Inherent SEO in Web Designer Premium365

I would like to make a request for more inherent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features in Web Designer Premium. I look to Xara to provide such features as key benefits to the users. I think you already do this to some extent both through manual features offered the designer and I am sure in ways that I cannot see through good coding practice for JS, CSS, and HTML. Thank you for that!

Google is obviously changing the SEO rules and moving to more of a mobile focus, so we know the mobile variants are key. Load times and caching efficiency are also becoming important. Perhaps some things are out of your control such as server compression schemes, but maybe not.

For instance pingdom.com provides a fairly good score for my Xara sites but provides these suggestions for improvement:

(A) Leverage browser caching

"The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime. Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the following resources:" followed by a list of mostly (but not all) images.

(B) Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header

"The following publicly cacheable, compressible resources should have a "Vary: Accept-Encoding" header:" followed by a number of JS and CSS files.

Addressing these should be easy and of course details are on the Google Developers sites.

I would also suggest that a key marketing tool for Xara in this product is "Inherent SEO" and "SEO Tools" that makes your pages rank above the others.

Thanks!

Hi Vectorspace,
I agree with you completely, I would love to see any sort of tool to help my site move up organically in search rankings. I pay Google Adwords to get my site kick-started with search visibility, but many of my competitors are above me with organic rankings -- I suppose they deserve it due to their time in the market and diligence with SEO, but any trick to catch up with them would be appreciated. Adwords makes me crazy sometimes (or often!) and I don't feel comfortable being so reliant on paid search.
Yep, I ran that Google website evaluator and got the same suggestions, all weirdness to me and couldn't find any real-world explanation or solution, other than handing my site over to the pros to sort it out . . . . but that defeats the purpose of doing my own website.

Cheers, Kevin

Thanks for the comment and confirmation Kevin!

I think you make a good point -- Xara Web Designer Premium 365 allows those with some to enough technical knowledge and creativity to create a website because of the features and cost. It puts great website technology into the hands of those that want to use it at a reasonable cost -- assuming they want to put in their own time or staff's time on the website. That isn't enough to get their site fully ranked in all aspects of SEO. As I pointed out, it would be great for Xara to add as much SEO capability as possible for on-page / code techniques. Some of my customers want me to set everything up, but then have the option to edit things themselves. Xara would be perfect for this as an alternative to WordPress

There are a lot of resources to explain basics of other off-page SEO, such as MOZ, and other evangelists, including some summary blogs I put together. Adwords helps get you on the first Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) at a cost... and the advantage goes away when you stop paying Google. Having organic results from SEO type efforts for your site should ramp up in 2-6 months to reduce or eliminate advertising costs -- of course depending on how competitive your market is.

Xara could help their customers be successful for on-page SEO more than they already have done by staying on top of on-page SEO techniques and incorporating them into this product.

Mike
Technivise