Seo?

[remi]

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

[covoxer]

@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.

May be.

[PhilM]

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

[planetsquid]

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

[steve.ledger]

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.

Which is where you make use of the ALT and TITLE attributes in the <IMG tag. Googlebot likes ALT text

[pauland]

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.

[steve.ledger]

It's still possible to group text and let it remain as text Paul

The WD help files says:

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.

[planetsquid]

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