Do websites designed with html/css have an advantage over websites designed with VSD. Is there any difference at all to the robots, crawlers and how they index sites.

Thanks
Joe

Joe,

SEO is as much a guess as anything else. With Google having 70% of the search engine traffic, the focus seems to be getting better Google rankings. Google keeps their ranking formula secret, but there are some suggestions that seem to work.

Have a domain name that has your keyword. If you are selling widgets, try to get a domain of widget.com or my widgetsite.com.

Put your keywords in meta tags. With VSD, there is a special tool. I don't have VSD with me right now, but check the help file for how to enter keywords. Make sure your key words are what you want to sell, and don't repeat your key words. If you have a page of red widgets, you can put red widgets on that specific page, then if you ahve a page of green widgets, that would be teh page for having that key word in the meta tag.

Finally, make sure you have the keywords showing on your page. If you have a help file on how to use widgets, put a link to that on the page selling widgets.

Most of this is stuff I have gleaned from reading what others do.

VSD is not very search engine friendly. I found out after naming all my images according to my keywords for SEO purposes, that VSD actually CHANGES all the files names from "keyword1.jpg" and "keyword2.jpg" to "Img_1.jpg" and "image_2.jpg".

But there IS a work-around. It seems that if you save your files as .PNG then VSD leaves the file names alone...

Also, whenever you apply Advanced Text effects to your text (Shadow etc) VSD saves that text as an IMAGE. This means Google's spiders can't crawl it!

There are a few advantages to this, however. For example, if you want to use a crazy font that you know no one's going to have on their computer, you can give it a shadow and then it becomes an image! 100% browser compatibility!

Here is an example:

http://www.disneysubmarines.com/

The Walt Disney font above the video at the top of the page, no WAY anyone's got that on their computer, but it works in all browsers bc I added a shadow. If you don't WANT a shadow, just set the shadow to "zero" or "one" so it's barely noticeable.

VSD also is not search engine friendly because they do not support dashes in URLs. The dashes in between words in the URL is what allows Google to tell words apart. Lets say your site is about, oh, I dunno the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage at Disneyland. If you made a page URL like "www.disneysubmarines.com/finding-nemo-disneyland.html" then Google would recognize the keywords "finding nemo" and "disneyland" in your url = good for search rank! But VSD will only allow you to make your url "www.disneysubmarines.com/findingnemodisneyland.html" = not good for SEO (doesn't HURT it, just doesn't help it).

A shorter answer to your question is this: YES. A hand coded site will ALWAYS have better advantage simply because you have more CONTROL, and can code your images however you want. ALL wysiwygs have limitations, although VSD is def one of the better one's out there.

If you really want a high site rank get some good quality non-reciprocal links from companies like TNX.net or textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is more expensive than TNX, but in the long run they are far less likely to end up getting penalized by Google for "selling" text links. If you visit their site you will understand why.

Or just email webmasters of high PR sites that have similar keywords as your and ask to do link swap.

Bill,
Like you I am also trying to learn about SEO. What I've found is that it sounds pretty simple and straight forward. I feel though, like I am missing something because of companies out there specializing in seo, that will tweak you site for a few hundred dollars/month or more. What are they doing ? I dunno.

Chad,
Nice site, good job. I rely more on the text for SEO but thanks for the *.png as I do have a gallery page. I have one competitors site which always comes up #1 in the organic rankings. We are friendly competitors and he sends me work when he's busy and visa versa. He has a company that does his SEO and I would like to catch up to him.
Thanks for your valuable input
Joe

Joseph,

One of the regulars here on the CoffeeCup forums received an ad from one of the SEO companies telling her they could help her website and get it to the first page on Google.

I suspect they do that by paying for the ad.

She sent them an email that she was already on the first page. She did it with meta tags, good content on her site, and good use of the key words in the content on her site.

My opinion is that there are so many SEO companies because it is easy money for them and they don't do all that much.

Hello, I think there probably are many SEO companies out there that are just blowing smoke as you suggest, but many of them are legitimate and are worth every penny.

Being number one for a search term means nothing unless your search term is one that people actually type in. For example http://www.disneysubmarines.com/ is number one on Google for the search term Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. But almost nobody is typing Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage into Google, they are typing keywords like disneyland (that one in the MILLIONS) and the phrase finding nemo is also popular by itself, without the words Disneyland Submarine Voyage with them.

I am on the third page for the keyword finding nemo but for disneyland i'm not even in the top 100 search results on Google, WAY to much competition. If Disney Submarines WAS in the top ten for such a popular keyword my site would literally crash, the server would not be able to handle all the extra traffic.

SEO companies that charge you around $2,000 per year, and guarantee you top ten placement in Google are really earning every penny of their money if you have a lot of competition for your search term. That's because other competing sites are always trying to bump you (they have their OWN SEO people) and they must monitor your site and optimize your keywords DAILY to keep you at the very top of the search engines. But the exposure you get through extra visitors (which equals extra sales if you are a commerce site) will pay you back whatever you spent on SEO many times over if you pick the right company.

I don't sell anything on my site so there's no reason for me to hire an SEO company, however I spend almost as much time doing SEO for my sites as I spent creating them. What's the point of putting your heart and soul into a site if no one is going to find it to enjoy it? Plus I do have Google ads on there that cover the cost of hosting, and my annual trips to Disneyland to update the site's content :-)

Yes, I agree with both of you.

Bill, that is why I try and do my own SEO, because I dont want to spend
big bucks and I it is something I can do and learn how to get better at.

Chad, you are correct. I have a business and one of the things I do is carpet cleaning. Everyone and his mom has a carpet cleaning business here so I dont even show up (well maybe around page 7)

I also have a stone and ceramic tile restoration business and I show up in the top 5 on page 1 for that, due to way less competition.

Just wish I new the secrets, maybe I should find a forum for that too

Thanks guys

I just want to chime in a little bit on the SEO part. When VSD was originally created, its sole purpose was to allow users to make a great looking site without having to know anything about HTML. Overtime, we found that a lot of our VSD users were actually very accomplished Webmasters who just preferred to use VSD instead of an editor because it was so easy to build something that looked great.

We have recognized this new user trend and have been slowly modifying that software to bridge more of the gap between a code based editor and a visual editor. Now while adding some of the suggestions posted here may sound easy, you have to go back to how the software was originally designed because we are still constrained by the original framework of the software.

Version 6.0 had a lot of enhancements over version 5.9. The most significant thing is that everything validates (yippee!) . We have some other ideas on how to allow even more customization, but we are proceeding with caution to make sure what we add not only will be easy for the user to understand, but will also not over complicate things.

Rest assured that we are listening to all of our users and take all comments and suggestions very seriously. Even though a suggestion maybe a very good one, there are sometimes technology constraints that we have to deal with.

Version 6.06 does not do this anymore. All image names are preserved as they are entered in. Take a look here at http://hotsync.net/vsdimages/ The first page shows 2 GIF's added and the Page 2 shows 2 png's added. Both of the image names are preserved.

Hi Scott,

You've created great software and should be very proud of it, overall.

As for the name changes, I am using 6.06 and its still doing this for me. When I upgraded, I deleted all the images from my "_website" folder, because this causes VSD to re-sample and then re-save them when you save your website. I then re-uploaded the website.

It is still converting the file names on the JPEGS on my end. Perhaps I am doing something wrong...

http://www.disneysubmarines.com/index.html