Seo?

[PhilM]

@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

[haakoo]

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?

[covoxer]

**John(Covoxer),can you make an automatic generated xml/sitemap to export along the default.css?

This is on the whishlist.

[haakoo]

Addition to the seo rules
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...and%20indexing

Hans

[nickydude]

This is on the whishlist.

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.gif

[covoxer]

No, I don't think so.

[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