Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Tips for Xara Websites

**steve.ledger** · 25 June 2009, 10:39 PM

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.

**richinri** · 26 June 2009, 10:16 PM

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.

**ss-kalm** · 27 June 2009, 02:42 AM

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.

**cursor** · 27 June 2009, 04:46 AM

His reference to the term "hit" is suggesting that it's a negative thing.

**robobugs** · 27 June 2009, 09:22 AM

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.

**robobugs** · 27 June 2009, 09:40 AM

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.

**slavelle** · 28 June 2009, 12:51 AM

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.

**seo-marketing** · 04 July 2009, 11:41 AM

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

**slavelle** · 04 July 2009, 03:32 PM

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.