Xara for simple web sites?

[gwpriester]

SEO is not some form of black magic. It is common sense and due diligence.

If you want your site to score well, then make sure each page has a descriptive title, that you have a clear and short page description, and that your content matches the content on the page. There is some debate as to whether keywords are important, but just to be on the safe side, about a dozen or less relevant keywords. Again, the more the title, description, and keywords match your page content the better you will do.

Then of course, is your content unique, or is it generic with 10 million other sites. If your entire website is self indulgent blather, then all the SEO tweaking in the world is not going to help you.

Xara gives photos and graphics exported as bitmaps, numbers instead of retaining the photo name. A search engine cannot determine the content of a photo that is named 23.png or 123.jpg. But if you take the time to name your images using the Names (the yellow name tag) feature. Use the format filename="image-name" Do you add a file extension (PNG, JPG). But replace image-name with something description.

In the Website Properties > Image section, you can add a brief description of the image. For example, if your image is a red corkscrew for left handed persons, you could apply filename="corkscrew" and your image. So now when a search engine is indexing your content, they know that there is a photo of a red corkscrew, for left handed persons.

As I said, this is not magic, it's logic and a bit of extra work.

[gwpriester]

Yada - Large sites, especially large sites with lots of photos can slow things down, but if you manage your content wisely, your computer has a reasonable amount of memory, and it sounds like you have these things, then there should not be a problem.

If you have a lot of photographs that you took with your digital camera and each one is 400 pixels wide, but the resolution is say 600-1200dpi, then this will consume a lot of system memory. If you Optimize all Images, and select a dpi of 96 or 150, this cuts way down on the amount of memory your computer needs to process this document.

I just tried this out. I have a photo I took with my camera. In Xara it is 800 pixels wide. The actual size of the photo is 5184 x 3456 pixels. The file size is 4.4MB

I optimized the photo to 96dpi and now the physical size is 800 x 533 pixels and the file size is 386K. Multiply this photo times 10 or 20 or 50 and you can see how optomizing the photos is going to free up a ton of memory.

[Larry Cole]

Richinri

Yes, I wanted opinions on the SEO abilities or Xara.

Larry

[zaphodeist]

Xara is no better or worse than any other program. As Gary has pointed out it's what you do for the purposes of seo that makes the difference. Good seo is not dependent on the program used as long as the program produces html that validates, which Xara does. There are plenty of sites out there that will test your site and give a low score then try and sell you a "fix", just like a lot of anti-malware sites do. Try validating a site with Google instead.