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I'm just too lazy and busy to search so i thought asking here is the easiest way:
Does XWD generated html affect SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Asking because one thing that has been pointed out is the div and text line "soup", and I wonder how search engines react on that. Also, as far as I know, some search engines "rank" hits by heading tags, meaning the structure of H1, H2, ... P tags are actually important.
No, search engines do not put any importance on <H1> links or any other links. For that matter not even, it is said, keyword tags.
The mis-named 'tag soup' is in fact a lot simpler and more straightforward than most websites, and can be indexed perfectly normally by any search engine. So your text is perfectly visible and indexable (is that a word) by Search Engines.
SEO is all about the content - the text. Your ranking is affected by the quality and relevance of your text, and more so by the inbound links and the quality of the sites linking to you.
Charles, you can't say that, because _nobody_ knows the algorithms of Google, so it's not serious saying something like that from your side. You will find contests out there, organized from Computer magazines or others, were so called "SEO experts" can try to get the biggest rank within Google or other search engines. But in the end, nobody knows, when Google will change their algorithm the next time (there were some changes in the last years).Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Moir
It's not mis-named, Charles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Moir
I agree, that some other websites look more terrible, but your exported HTML code is not "perfectly" indexable by Search Engines. Maybe some search engines will use it without problems, but "perfectly" is a marketing exaggeration.
Remi
Sorry Remi, but I'm taking this. If you continue to criticise the product and the opinions of people who know a lot more about it than you do, then I have to ask why you're here?
Tag soup implies a mix, a soup - as you know perfectly well our HTML is very clean, very simple, this is not an opinion, it is a fact. It is just a set of plain text lines one after another placed on the page where the user puts them. We use fewer tags than almost everyone else. Our HTML IS simpler than that from almost all other web authoring software.
Our HTML IS indexable by all search engines, this is fact. And you're continued implications and suggestions that this is not the case are misleading.
So I have to assume you're being trouble maker for the hell of it. You don't want to continue down that line.
Excuse me?Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Moir
Maybe I will comment this a little bit later.
I find this particular statement rather difficult to accept. While it may be true for the kind of web layout software that XWD is, it's just untrue compared to other web authoring software. In particular, most authoring software doesn't generate multiple text fields for single paragaphs of text, so the html they produce in 'design' mode is far simpler than that generated by XWD.Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Moir
This isn't a dig at XWD, which is a great program with some technical limitations from an authoring POV, but blanket statements such as that above go a little too far.
If anyone reading this is wondering why they should use XWD rather than software that potentially produces leaner HTML code, well they shouldn't wonder, they should use XWD. XWD bypasses the hassles of complex layout by generating HTML code in a specific way. Generating those layouts in most other authoring programs requires a great deal of skill and knowledge about HTML.
XWD is superb at what it does at a great price point.
Well I'd agree that blocks of text HTML can be simpler, but that overall you just need to look the source HTML of almost any commercial website to see the very definition of HTML soup. They use much more complex HTML. I just did a 'view source' on this page. Makes my point nicely.
We can't accurately output whole blocks of text. The WYSIWYG requirement - the very point of this product makes that difficult to impossible. So we split a block of text into simple plain HTML lines, positioned exactly where you see them in WD.
The question asked was whether our HTML was anti-search engine, and it's not. We know, and tests show, WD websites are searched and indexed just fine by search engines.
Yes, nobody knows. But developers of those algorythms are not that stupid to give anyone this easy way to fool their engine. Just imagine that site which contains all the text within <h1> elements rated higher than properly structured one with less important sub headers, never mind the non header text. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by remi
That's the reason why they completely ignore the meta tags for example. To be the most obective as to the content of the site, search engine has to get as close to the real human perception of the page as possible. And it is not even near to the htm structuring. And you know it for sure. :rolleyes:
It's easy to give a page look absolutely irrelevant to it's internal structure. So good SEO cant rely on structure.
Now how can you know this if:Quote:
Originally Posted by remi
:rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by remi
Oh yes, really, it's easy to prove that WD pages are indexed well. Just enter any arbitrary fragment of text from the Gary's workbook into Google, I enetered this one: "Professional website designers can use Xara Web Designer", and it gave me the correct link to this page on the first place.
Here: http://www.google.com/search?client=...utf-8&oe=utf-8
This is a WD produced page.
Of course, it's a long text so it easily got to 1st position, if you enter something that may appear on higher rated sites then it will go down, but it is perfectly indexed and searchable. Or you have troubles finding something on the WD pages out there? :rolleyes:
For whatever it's worth (and I'm primarily a CoffeeCup user so I'm far from being a Xara fanboi) I looked at the page source of the sample/work page Charles linked at the top of this forum today. Even as a comparable HTML novice I found it no problem to follow the code--far, far easier to follow for me than the table-happy stuff that's so common out there. Puzzling out tables-within-tables? Forget it. :p
@Remi:
Can I suggest that WebDesigner represents a major paradigm shift in web page creation and that you need to think about it in a new way?
WebDesigner's main goal is to make it easy for people who don't know, or don't want to know, anything about HTML to create rich web pages that can be viewed by a wide audience. Think about what's important in that context:
1. The HTML output has to adhere to the real-world constraints of what actually works in the major browsers and search engines. Any other constraints are secondary.
2. The HTML output can't be allowed to create difficulties for our target users during editing. In particular, the user needs to be able to predict what his page will look like in all the major the browsers (WYSIWYG) and so we avoid any HTML structure that would prevent that.
Thus, WebDesigner successfully achieves its goals by outputting HTML in a particular format. That format is not unreasonable or unclean and complies with the relevant standards.
By all means offer criticism but it's unreasonable to criticise things that the program was never intended to do or can't do because they would break the original goals of the program.
WebDesigner is only at Version 1.0. We will be able to implement some users expectations and wishes in future versions (maybe even some of yours ;-) but we won't abandon the new paradigm of WYSIWYG web page creation that we have established.
That is the raison d'etre of WebDesigner.
Phil
Rules by Google;
Headings aren't important,text,textlinks and good use of alt and title are
Best is to use an xml sitemap.
Google preferences for SEO
Hans
**John(Covoxer),can you make an automatic generated xml/sitemap to export along the default.css?
This is on the whishlist.Quote:
Originally Posted by haakoo
Addition to the seo rules
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...and%20indexing
Hans
Is it possible to take a look at this wishlist so we're not repeating ourselves? Pretty Please? http://www.comicguide.net/images/smilies/tatschel.gifQuote:
This is on the whishlist.
No, I don't think so.
Back to the topic: SEO.
Google is recommending the following best practices:
"Good practices for content
[...]
Avoid:
- dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without
paragraph, subheading, or layout separation"
(source: "Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide", page 12)
With "subheading" the headers (<h1> - <h6>) are meant. With other words: Please use headers.
With "paragraphs" blocks of text are meant. With other words: Please don't pull apart your sentences.
This is only the SEO starter guide and we know, that Google will not tell us all the tricks. As I said in my post #3, from time to time there are SEO contests out there and the results of these contests are very interesting.
@Charles:
I'm not saying that XWD's HTML would be anti-search engine.
My comment was more because of the attribute "perfectly" but it seems that I've misinterpreted the english word. In German this means something like "unsurpassable", but I've seen that you've used the word "fine" in your third post and covoxer has used the word "well". Therefore this seems to be a wrong interpretation on my side. No harm meant.
@John:
I think, the current search engines are a little bit more intelligent these days. "Content is the king" and the structure of a text is important. Maybe not, in order to include a normal page within their index, but maybe in order to apply a higher rank to a website.
Disclaimer (necessary these days):
I'm not implying anything I haven't said.
Remi
May be. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by remi
The second link that haakoo supplies (post #14) leads to a Google "Webmaster guidelines" page: http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769. It suggests viewing your web site using the Lynx text only browser. Quote:
"Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."
It may be informative to try that on pages created by WebDesigner.
Phil
A couple of years ago I wrote a small VB utility at work which strips out all tags from a HTML file until there is nothing left but the actual meaningful 'text'. After reading this thread I fired it up and ran some XWD generated pages through it. The results were as expected... perfectly readable.
If my simple program (and I mean really simple) can make sense of XWD pages then a search engine sure isn't going to have a problem understanding the contents.
The only issue that I can see being a problem is XWD's desire to turn indexable text into PNG files. This seems to happen if you group any text.
Rich
Which is where you make use of the ALT and TITLE attributes in the <IMG tag. Googlebot likes ALT text :)Quote:
Originally Posted by planetsquid
I think planetsquids point was that many people may not realise their text has turned into a graphic image. It's not an ideal situation.
It's still possible to group text and let it remain as text Paul
The WD help files says:
Quote:
Text inside groups for websites
When a document is exported as a website, all groups get exported as images. So any text inside groups is not present as text in your exported website, and so it can't be picked up by search engines or selected and copied as text by a visitor to your site.
For graphical buttons, headings, logos etc. this is usually desirable as the text just forms part of the graphic. But you may have more substantial pieces of text inside groups which you want to remain as text in your exported web page. To arrange this, all you need to do is apply the special name "HTMLText" to your text object. The easiest way to do this is as follows:
Go into the Text Tool and click on your text to insert the text cursor.
Press escape so that the whole text object becomes selected.
Open the Name dialog (Utilities->Names...).
Either select the "HTMLText" name from the "Apply name" dropdown list if you've already used it in the current document, or type in the name "HTMLText". Then click "Add" to add the name.
Now, when you export your website, your text will remain as text and the rest of the group will be converted to an image. All the text panels provided in the Designs gallery already have this name applied to the text objects inside them, so the text on the panels will export as text.
Thanks for the suggestion. Wouldn't it be great if XWD could automatically fill in the ALT attribute for any text object that it rasterizes? Another one to add to the ever growing wish list.
I don't blame John for not letting us see Xara's in-house wish list. I'm sure their competition would call it the "XWD list of shortcomings". Not something you want in the public domain.
Rich
Yes, but how many people will read that help file. It's not an intuitive behaviour for the casual user.Quote:
Originally Posted by sledger
Yes, I agree that XWD should fill in the ALT tags automatically in these circumstances.
Paul
Obviously not as intuitive as finding something wrong with every answer provided it seems.Quote:
Originally Posted by pauland
Paul, questions have been asked and answers provided. This is what the TG forums are for no?
I see no point in providing solid answers for you to simple turn them back on me..
Sledger, it's not about you, it's just an opinion expressed about the software. Your answer was perfect in addressing the software as it currently is. My comment made the point that the behaviour of the software is not so intuitive - not a reflection on you or your answer.
I don't know what's going on with talkgraphics these days - so many people seem to be taking offense at innocent comment about the software.
I hear you! :D
I mean the idea to add alt on text rasterization. Have to think about it.