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Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
With so many questions, arguments, and concerns surrounding SEO and Xara, I would like to hear Tips and Techniques that will help Xara Websites be more Search Engine Friendly.
Please do not criticize Xara or bash their software, but instead provide useful tips to help everyone make better websites.
I will start off with a couple tips I have learned.
1. Make sure the page Title is descriptive of the content. Don't include words that aren't found on the page. Search Engines can tell if you are "spamming" or "fishing" for people to view your site.
2. Name your pages in the Web Properties box. Each page should have a descriptive name with no spaces. Use the - symbol to represent a space, this is the universal web standard character for a space. This is also true for Domain Names and can really make a difference. Use the - always.
3. Use the page description in the Web Properties box. Write a short summary of the page and try hard to leave out general terms like and, is, of, the, etc. Make sure you hit the main keywords of your page.
4. Make sure to include your keywords in the text of your page. Use them several times in meaningful context without spamming them. About 5-8 times should be good.
5. In the page Keywords box of the Web Properties for each page, incluse the main keywords on your page. A page usually doesn't need more than about a dozen keywords to cover all of it. Some search engines don't even pay attention to this section anymore because of spammers, but do it to be on the safe side.
6. Include Image Descriptions (Alt tags) for EVERY picture on your site. Graphics that have text should probably also be tagged too. This helps Search Engines see your site in a text format better. They don't look at graphics or grouped text and may miss the information is you don't do this.
7. If you want your site to be iPhone friendly (or other phones), do not use animations or Flash at all. iPhones do not display Flash or .flv files at all, but handle MouseOvers and other Java features fine. Flash is VERY intense on the visitors computer CPU, and some other browsers may not display Flash correctly either, I'm not sure though.
8. If you are worried about search engines not seeing your menus or NavBars properly, submit a sitemap to them. There is alot of information about this on the Web and most, if not all, search engines now use a standard format. There are even FREE automatic sitemap generators available for sites with less than 500 pages.
9. Use the Placeholder feature to include extra information if you want to. That's what it's there for! If you're worried about having a h1, h2, etc. code layout, just insert your paragraphs into these header tags using placeholders. More info on this is available in this forum. A quick search will find lots of help. It is worth it to note that Google may not be placing such importance on this anymore, but without their help we cannot know for sure. Spammers and fakes have ruined alot of the techniques you read about anymore. Search engines are getting smarter everyday, so take the h1 stuff with a grain of salt.
10. When updating your site, be sure to "ping" the search engines so they know to crawl your new content. A quick web search will help learn this technique. Search for "ping search engine" and you will be rolling.
I hope these tips help you use Xara more effectively. I have links to many of my favorite tools, but I don't want to upset the moderators or viewers. If you would like some good links, and it's cool with the moderators, I will post them in a followup post.
So, let's keep this thread moving forward with constructive help from the Pros, and please leave the bickering or whining out so we can make the most of this software, and our creative talents.
I look forward to seeing some more tips from more experienced designers!
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Thanks for all that, refreshingly clear to seo newbies like myself :) A bit of clarification though, in point #2 you say to use "-" for a space, I thought it was the underscore "_" ?
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
As far as I know, 'underscores' are ignored by Google.
Hyphens are separators.
Underscores were used in file names where spaces were not permitted (in DOS for example) But not web URLs.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Ah right, thanks Steve :) Have to do a bit of renaming.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Don't take my word as Gospel John - after all, XWD and Xtreme use underscores for folder names which become part of the URL and written in html.
I'm no expert..
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
... XWD and Xtreme use underscores for folder names ...
True enough
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1 Attachment(s)
Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
John you can use a dash (en-dash or em-dash), hyphen, or underscore to replace a space.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
More info here and here from Google on underscores/hyphens.
Drwyd
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Thanks for the information Robobugs.
Rupert
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Drwyd
More info
here from Google on underscores/hyphens.
Drwyd
Thanks for the Google video link.
This is what I'd read in the past.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Wonderful advice at the beginning of this thread. Never forget amongst the suggestions that textual content converted to graphics WILL ALMOST ALWAYS result in a search engine hit.
There was way too much talk when XWD first came out about "just make your text a graphic". I was criticized then for raising the issues about SEO. I am glad to see the realities of the internet are being more realistically discussed in these forums.
:)
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
richinri
...... Never forget amongst the suggestions that textual content converted to graphics WILL ALMOST ALWAYS result in a search engine hit ......
Sorry, Rich. What do you mean by that? I would have thought it would have just the opposite effect. i.e no search engine hits.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
His reference to the term "hit" is suggesting that it's a negative thing.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
If your site update is not being picked up by major search engines, you should consider creating a sitemap and submitting it to them. Information can easily be found by searching something like "submitting creating sitemap".
If moderators OK it, I can provide links to the ones I use. I don't want to endorse any services until I am 100% sue they work. Nor do I want to spam the thread.
Most major search engines have agreed on a single type of file called an XML file which contains all the pages of your site. This file is inserted into your website main directory and can be created by many free online services. You will need to upload it into the main or root directory of your site and then notify the major search engines of this. You can find links for most major search engines by searching something like "submit sitemap". This lets the search engine scanning bots know every page on your site so they can crawl effectively and include all of your content.
Whenever you submit a new or revised sitemap, the search engines will check out your new information and update their databases. This is also referred to as a ping. When you do this, search engines "see" your SEO improvements, design changes, and more and then include them in search results.
I have not had a chance to test this, but it should work nicely from what I've learned so far. I happened to do a link check on my site and discovered a huge section of links which were wrong, so now I am fixing that. I will update when I fix them and do more testing.
If you have any notes on this, please feel free to share them.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
cursor
His reference to the term "hit" is suggesting that it's a negative thing.
I agree. We want POSITIVE Hits as in "finds". Converting your text information into graphics will basically "hide" it from search engines.
Search for "lynx viewer" and submit your site address to see what the search engines see. If the link in question is not visible in lynx, then search engines cannot find it either. The text you enter in the Web Properties box usually appears though. So if you want to make a graphic link, make sure to use Web Properties dialog box and set "link to address" to go to the desired link.
To prevent this problem in the first place, you should avoid grouping text. Grouping text is often done to force the text to appear exactly as it does in Xara. Text does look different in Xara than it does on an exported site viewed in a browser. This is due to Xara's profound ability to display text in a clean and scalable format. Browsers see things in points and pixels which reveals the actual appearance of the text instead of the nicely smoothed version of Xara's interface.
Hope that helped.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
To tag on what robo said,
Interstingly, this font display shortcoming has been very effectively addressed over various incarnations of clear type, the best I've seen being in Windows 7 with IE8. It's hard to tell that the fonts look the way they do (especially when larger) in this combo, where if you go back to XP with IE6 (like I did last night using the built in Windows 7 Virtual XP session) it definitely looks different.
There are times to make things graphics and times to leave things as text, but a good general rule is that your content should be text, your headings can be either, but they need to have ALT attributes if they are graphics indicating what they are, and if you link somewhere, it's best to at least have one plain old text link somewhere, for a number of different reasons. these new styled big grey footers I've seen showing up on a lot of sites these days are a great place for a list of plain text links.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
hi,
you have relly provided the great and essential tips to make a website SEO friendly .One should also be careful to eliminate all the duplicate content from website.Search engines are very harsh on that.
thanks
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Please expand on the "duplicate content" part. I know that they don't care for the same information on several pages of your site (hopefully to exclude things in the header,nav and footer, sidebar, etc), but I'd like to know more about how specific these duplicate content rules are.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Hello All,
Great thread. Ive just completed my own site at RED BARN Graphic Design Studio and I have a few SEO questions.
1. How do you insert an html sitemap into your page?
2. My site is very graphic, especially the portfolios Red Barn Portfolios, so I did something strange... I inserted and "invisible" layer of text just above the background layer. I coloured it the same as the background so now you cant see it. Question is.. I know search engines can penalize you for doing this, but does anyone think, looking at the code, that this will happen??
If not, its a great solution to balancing the amount of graphics to text for SEO purposes!!
Comments on my site will also be appreciated as this is my first XXpro Site..
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Hi LindyJo
Text that is hidden in some way, either by CSS trickery or by the method you have used, can sometimes trigger a penalty in the search engines.
Drwyd
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Lindy - that's an obvious abuse and one of the first rules in the Google webmaster guidelines of what not to do.
Related: Since popup layers are "hidden" until exposed by the user (and maybe this is the thing that saves them), do they count againt us? I don't know if the Google mechanisms can tell between intentionally hidden text for the purpose of tricking the search engine and text hidden for the purpose of design.
I like puting some stuff in popup layers - like a "more info" sort of thing rather than cluttering the page up with text detail that the user may not want to see, but if this will cause penalty, I will need to move to doing individual pages.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
I dont mean to trick the search engines but because of the way Xara uses objects and images its difficult to get the balance between text and images right.
I would love to hear if anyone know if you can use popup layers to boost the text content.. I would prefer that, cause I feel guilty :(
I'll leave it till I find another solution... lets see what happens..
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Pop ups should be fine as they are triggered by a visible link. Stuff like white text on a white background, font size 0, moving text off the page (text-indent: -9999) or hiding text underneath images is a big no no.
If you have images on your site make sure you have added "alt text" to help the search engines work out what your pages are all about.
For XML site maps I recommend you have a look at this site. Once the map has been created it can be uploaded by FTP to your root directory. You can then point to it with Google Webmaster Tools.
Drwyd
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Question: When using the "Tracker code" box in website options. (WD6) can I put more than one tracker code in there ? I use Google Webmaster Tools and Anylitics but was also wanting to use Alexa. Has anyone else used Alexa ?
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Hey these tips are good and helpful for the newbie in seo...
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Well, there are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa ratings seriously. If you want to sell ad space of your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need a better Alexa Ranking and Google PR. There are many online shoppers who are still very skeptical of where they are going to shop on the internet. So they usually follow the others and use ratings like Alexa, Google pagerank or other traffic rankers to perceive the value of your site.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
John - Are you saying that new member Yanie merely copied his comments from the Google Success website? :rolleyes:
And do you think that a spam link is soon to come? :rolleyes:
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
I think it highly likely Officer
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
I think you may have thwarted his rather lame spam attempt ;)
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
i really appriciate your all points... but i like the most one is the 7th one that i completely don't know about how to handel it..
thank's for sharing...
Thank's
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
I noticed references to third party sites to create site maps. XDP does this for you automatically.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
A couple of things I've learned SEO is about MEO [maximising Every Opportunity] rather than just doing one thing. A list of what I've learned so far is below and so I hope it helps others.
:- organise your keywords in order of preference [i.e. having the most important keyword for your page show first rather than last]
:- chose one key word per page to focus on rather than several
:- put your most important key word for that page in the title, web address, meta description
:- organise your Headers [H1/H2/H3 etc] and have one H1 per page.
I also have two questions re: SEO, one specifically for Xara and another for SEO linking software
1: - Thing I've found with Xara in the past is that I've written ALT text for the images but when publishing the site... the image text doesn't publish. When I go to view source it'll show img938.jpeg for example. How do I and other users get around this?
2: - For those of you who are familiar with SEO linking software whether it's from SEOMoz, Majestic etc... who would you recommend for the layman to use? I've been looking at these software programs [not link farms] and have become confused by the choice that is available.
Regards,
AutoEvo
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Am I right in saying that you should also make a point of naming each image in your website as well as using 'Alt Text' so the file has valid name rather than say 'pic1.jpg' e.g. a picture of a horse would be 'horse.jpg'.
To give the image a name, just select 'Names' after right clicking on the image and in this example you would add the folowing (filename="horse") without the brackets. The only issue I've found in doing this is that you have to remember to use a different 'name' if you have say two pictures of horses as it will overwrite the first one and you will then have the same picture in two locations on the website.
From what I remember, Google ranks page content higher if the image files are relevant to the text they correspond with, and indeed the keywords and description on that page.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jacobitejake
Am I right in saying that you should also make a point of naming each image in your website as well as using 'Alt Text' so the file has valid name rather than say 'pic1.jpg' e.g. a picture of a horse would be 'horse.jpg'.
To give the image a name, just select 'Names' after right clicking on the image and in this example you would add the folowing (filename="horse") without the brackets. The only issue I've found in doing this is that you have to remember to use a different 'name' if you have say two pictures of horses as it will overwrite the first one and you will then have the same picture in two locations on the website.
From what I remember, Google ranks page content higher if the image files are relevant to the text they correspond with, and indeed the keywords and description on that page.
You are correct in what you say about naming of pictures but don't overdo it. Remember that search engine robots can't see pictures so it doesn't match your picture names with the content of the pictures.
Re Google ranks - what you said used to be true, but since Google is now getting significant income from website advertisers, the whole ranking system has gone a bit belly up in my opinion. I was recently searching for a specific make and model of camera using google and the results were quite interesting - all the top sites were those camera shops that advertised with google and the remainder on the first couple of pages were websites that did camera reviews. Switch to bing and you get a totally different picture
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
penmore
You are correct in what you say about naming of pictures but don't overdo it. Remember that search engine robots can't see pictures so it doesn't match your picture names with the content of the pictures.
Re Google ranks - what you said used to be true, but since Google is now getting significant income from website advertisers, the whole ranking system has gone a bit belly up in my opinion. I was recently searching for a specific make and model of camera using google and the results were quite interesting - all the top sites were those camera shops that advertised with google and the remainder on the first couple of pages were websites that did camera reviews. Switch to bing and you get a totally different picture
Excellent, thanks for the update and heads up re ranking, I'll definitely bare that in mind, much appreciated.
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Thanks robobugs, your post is greatly appreciated by me and maybe it could be expanded by the gurus from Xara.
I am getting slowly into the swing of things and I want to thank GWPriester and Pauland for their help, thanks guys. For what it's worth, I love Xara, it's so easy to use, but of course one has to to follow instructions :-) explicitely to get the best out of it.
Therefore, I'd love to see more on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the simple reason that google has become the "authority" on this. One of the reasons we make web pages is that others will look at it :-) and "google it".
I have used some free SEO sites to check up on my "compliance" on SEO and found that I need to smarten up on
1. H1 tags, H2 tags and H3 tags.
2. Robots txt test
3. Inline CSS (No idea what that means, sorry)
4. Domain Authority (is only 1, should be at least 20)
5. Page Authority (is only 1, should be at least 20)
BTW, I have checked up google's SEO, but it did not tell me HOW to get the tags, txt file, CSS, etc., just that I need to fix it. :-)
I used this http://smallseotools.com/website-seo-score-checker/ to check my site, http://ararat.holiday/gateway/
I also found this SEO program: Traffic Travis V4, any comments on this would be appreciated.
I did use <h1>my-header</h1> etc. by putting it into the HTML code insertion (header and body), but when published, this was OUTSIDE on the left of the pages. I should have thought that it would appear within the pages. My website is 760 pix wide, if that has any bearing? If any of you gurus could point me into the right direction in ref. to my 5 points above, jeez, that would be great.
Best regards
Frank
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Re: Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites
Quote:
Originally Posted by
CrankyFranky
Thanks robobugs, your post is greatly appreciated by me and maybe it could be expanded by the gurus from Xara.
I am getting slowly into the swing of things and I want to thank GWPriester and Pauland for their help, thanks guys. For what it's worth, I love Xara, it's so easy to use, but of course one has to to follow instructions :-) explicitely to get the best out of it.
Therefore, I'd love to see more on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the simple reason that google has become the "authority" on this. One of the reasons we make web pages is that others will look at it :-) and "google it".
I have used some free SEO sites to check up on my "compliance" on SEO and found that I need to smarten up on
1. H1 tags, H2 tags and H3 tags.
2. Robots txt test
3. Inline CSS (No idea what that means, sorry)
4. Domain Authority (is only 1, should be at least 20)
5. Page Authority (is only 1, should be at least 20)
BTW, I have checked up google's SEO, but it did not tell me HOW to get the tags, txt file, CSS, etc., just that I need to fix it. :-)
I used this
http://smallseotools.com/website-seo-score-checker/ to check my site,
http://ararat.holiday/gateway/
I also found this SEO program: Traffic Travis V4, any comments on this would be appreciated.
I did use <h1>my-header</h1> etc. by putting it into the HTML code insertion (header and body), but when published, this was OUTSIDE on the left of the pages. I should have thought that it would appear within the pages. My website is 760 pix wide, if that has any bearing? If any of you gurus could point me into the right direction in ref. to my 5 points above, jeez, that would be great.
Best regards
Frank
Frank, I would not rely on a site that returns this
Quote:
Warning! 3 internal urls found that are not seo friendly. An SEO friendly url must caontain only lower alphabets, numbers, slashes(/), dash(-). Underscores, upercase Alphabets and specialchars (e-g: & ? %) are nto seo friendly.
It also then tests for Keywords despite previously dissing them.
To get H1, H2 & H3 style use Xara's Styles in the Text Tool.
The rest is a waste of time.
Just create a site with useful content, with lots of meaning page titles.
The only one item that you didn't highlight - the use of Alt Text Web Properties > Image > Image Caption) for all your pictures. real people with visual impairment need these more than a SEO ranking.
Acorn