Flash Vs SEO

This topic has been written about ad nauseam but….

Many website owners want Flash on their website (many that I know, at least).

Designers are willing to do it for them. When the time comes to do online advertising, the Search Engine Consultant tells them that search engines cannot read flash files.

Now the website owner is confused. Why didn’t the designer tell him? Does this mean that all the money and time spent on having Flash files has gone down the drain?

I will attempt to answer some of the questions here.

Many designers do not know about this. Their job is to code/design and many of them do not know about the search engine marketing aspect of it. Would you ask your IT department to do your marketing for you? No. One group is logical and the other is creative. Two different worlds.

SEO must go hand in hand when designing the site. This saves time, money and frustration for both the designers and the website owners.

Whenever I see website owners going in for Flash, I caution them. Search engines look for certain things in a website:

• The website must load fast
• The back button must work especially if you are going to do Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
• No redirects to another page – This is considered as spam by search engines.

When you use Flash files:

• It often takes a long time for a website with Flash to load.
• Many flash files disable the "Back" button on the website
• Flash files often redirect to another page

Look at it from a user's perspective, if I come to a website with extensive flash in it and I have a dial up connection, I am not going to wait for the site to load. I just press the "Back" button and move on, as do many users. (Ouch, that hurt, didn’t it?).

The reason why search engines do not read Flash files?

Optimizing a Flash file includes creating text which has to be hidden so it cannot be seen by the human eye. This is easy to abuse and manipulate to hide spam, porn or other redirected sites.

Google has started indexing Flash files (at least the latest version of Flash) but it should be designed to have text in them. It is still a mess when it comes to getting ranking and generally advisable to avoid Flash files.

Separating each page of the Flash movie into separately crawlable pages is the advise of one consultant. More about the pains of optimizing a flash site is here.

If you still have not got the message, here's a flow chart that might convince you.

If you are still not convinced, here's something you can use…

Google expanding in Australia?

The latest blog on Google's Australian blog site is interesting. The line which caught my attention was the "growing Sydney office". Google is expanding its offices in Australia which is fantastic news!

The recruitment of professionals at the Sydney office was a little slow some months ago. One of my friend applied for a job and was told that someone in US will contact him, which never happened.

They have also conducted a roadshow for their product Adsense in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland. Adsense are the advertisements which show on top, right and left side of any web page you vist these days. It is titled "Ads by Google". Many website owners use it to generate additional revenue. You provide space on your website to run the ads and Google sends you a cheque. These ads can be text or video.

Here is a useful tip when using Google Adsense on your site:

Make sure the colors on your site blend with those of the Adwords advertisement.

SEO war for keyword Andrew Kontra

The other day a close friend of mine was challenged. The interesting thing that caught my attention was that it was SEO related. The challenge was to rank for a keyword "Andrew Kontra" who is an employee at Pacific Brands. Mr. Kontra is going to be getting a lot of publicity thanks to this challenge.

So taking this as an example, how exactly do you make someone famous (in the eyes of search engines)?

Blogs for Andrew Kontra
Links to similar sites

Now wait, if I reveal all, I might spoil the fun! Watch Andrew Kontra's space in the coming months, years.....

And while you are at it, buy Mr. Kontra a coffee!! ;)

Advertising and Marketing – The New & Old

Some years back, advertising and marketing were in the form of –

Media

• Television
• Radio

Print

• Newspapers (average cost of a classified AUD1,500)
• Magazines (average cost for half page AUD 15,000)

Outdoor

• Billboards (AUD 50,000 and above depending on the size, fabric etc)
• Ads on trams (especially in Melbourne)

Direct Mail (Mailing lists cost around AUD 14 - 50)

These methods cost a lot of money and a lot of time and effort went into creating them. Big corporations still do all of the above with a combination of some of the below forms of advertising.

New mediums of marketing which are cheaper or even better FREE!

With the advent of the internet, information is available and free. There is freedom to share knowledge and information. You do not have to pay for it. Better still, it allows small businesses to get publicity and traffic by paying very small amounts or nothing. It is no longer possible to
approach anyone with an aggressive sales pitch and hope to convert them. People are becoming blind to blatant forms of marketing and something new always interests them. The below methods are more subtle but the result is more effective.

Some of the newer and popular forms of advertising and marketing are given below:

Viral Marketing

Blogs (Blogger.com, Xanga.com)

Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, delicious)

Social Networking sites (Ecademy, Linkedin, Xing)

Online Press Releases (PRLog.com, PRLeap.com) - I provide services in this field

Article writing – I provide services in this field

Email Newsletter

Other paid forms of online advertising gaining popularity are:

Banners

Websites

Newer Marketing Technologies

Pay Per Click (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) – I provide services in this field

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Electronic Brochures

Streaming Video

Direct Response questionnaires

HTML presentations

Analytics – I provide services in this field

A combination of all of the above based on the industry you are in and the type of visitors you want to attract, all the methods mixed and matched form a great campaign.

Choose-your-domain-name-carefully!

It is widely known in SEO circles that choosing a domain name right is one of the important things. The reason is simple.

Imagine going to a networking event and meeting a potential client. You dont have a pen and paper and oops! you forgot to get your business card or ran out of them. Is it easier to say a name which relates to some aspect of your business? Or is it easier to say my url is: something-or-the-other.com with a lot of dashes?

Choose a domain name which relates to some aspect of your business and a name which is easy to remember. Over a period of time, you can create a brand around it and it goes a long way in getting a keyword as part of your url name. This helps in ranking higher especially in Google.

An example is my site which has the word "SEO" in it: http://www.seoecom.com.

Importance of online press releases

Press releases are an integral part of most company's (those who can afford it) PR campaign. From an SEO point of view, it is used as an integral part of our link buildig exercise.

Our lives have been made easier by the free online PR sites as it is light on our pockets. For small businesses who want to do some link building, PR is an ideal way to do it.

I-Newswire fell into Google's bad books after a 15-year old (Thomas Vendetta) played a prank by releasing a fake press release to the free site. You can read more here.

It remains to be seen if Google will drop all the free press release sites from their list or this is a one-off case which I hope it is. If not, then Google will be alienating a lot of small businesses or freelancers who cannot really afford to pay the exorbitant charges of the big boys.

An example of a free PR that I used recently - Website Owners Want Their Business To Be Found Online

Little Add Ons For Your Site

Do not forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located.

Viral marketing is an effective way of selling products and services. Customers who like your product or services must be encouraged to give testimonials and tell their friends about your business. Ask your customers to leave a comment on your site. Testimonials helps to build trust as they cannot see you and this is a good way to gaining trust.

Does Your Website Have Good SEO & User Experience?

Does your website have good SEO AND user experience? - that is the first question I like to ask business owners.

You have included your tags, meta tags, keywords and did your link building like every good website owner has done. What next? Will the search engines beat a path to your door and get you enormous amounts of traffic that will crash your server? The answer is no.

The above is just one tiny step towards achieving your business goal. First of all, sit down and write your goals. What is it you are looking for? Is it leads where you just want visitors to leave their names and contact information? Or is it more lofty, like earning some dollars while they are on your site? How do you get them to loosen their purse strings?

As a consultant, I always tell my customers, know your goals. Knowing what you want to get out of your visitors will help you create a targeted ad and a relevant landing page for the customers. If you are a mortgage broker, have a form on your site where interested customers can leave their contact information. In this way, you can make follow up calls and sell your products to them.

If you are a business selling multiple products, it is a good idea to have relevant keywords on the landing pages. In addition to that, you can upsell or give information on related products with a search function located in your site. So when a customer lands on a page selling, say, a softwares, you can have relevant add ons or similar products with the words "if you like this product, you may like these too" or something along those lines. You not only give the customer a good user experience, they may come back later too. And don’t forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located.

Just as in real life, where you don’t forget the friendly waitress who served you in one of your favourite cafes, and you want to come back for more, a user experience has to be made pleasant. There are no sales people to sell or give your customers information and it has to all be done by a silent website. So being intuitive, knowing your customer, having wish lists which you can refer to, remembering their birthdays, having live support on the site or a good help manual, all these go in creating a good impression and goes to increasing the bottom line.

As important as it is to have good search engine optimisation (SEO) like keywords, relevant landing pages and relevant url's, once the user lands on the page, it is important to make sure all links work, pages load quickly and makes the customer want to come back for more.

What to expect from a Search Engine Consultant

There are many self-proclaimed SEOs out there and it is difficult selecting someone suited to your business needs. Apart from hiring someone who knows some technical aspects of the business, an SEO must also be intuitive. Understanding the business makes an SEO more successful than someone who deals with their clients with a "one size fits all" attitude.

There are several ways to get ranked higher and quicker. There are fast ways of doing it, where you fall down faster too or you can do it the slow, hard and longer lasting way.

Here are some tips on what to expect

Building links from your site is important. The links you have per keyword, the higher your rating in the eyes of a search engine. Beware of link farming. The idea of link farming is to have reciprocal linking with other sites. The quality of these sites are important. If the link quality is not good, Google can label you as a 'bad neighbourhood' which means that Google has determined that you are swapping links in order to manipulate page rank. Adding links that your visitors can use is a good way to avoid this tag.

For example, if you are selling clothes, it does not make any sense to link to a website selling cameras, would it? Moreover, outbound links are always better than a link exchange. Of course, linking to a complementary site is good, if it drives some traffic your way. A partnership is better than linking to just anyone.

Before building links, it is important to optimize your website for certain keywords. Remember, one keyword per webpage. It is not always nice to find out that you ranked high in the search engine for words like "free" or "welcome to our site".

Relevant keywords are important and over time, you will come up higher.
Search engine optimisation is still a growing field and as long as Google, Yahoo and MSN is used to search for websites on the web, it will always be an important exercise to follow.

It is always better to have a website designer with SEO knowledge design your website, as it goes a long way in increasing your website's visibility to search engines.

SEO Tips For The Day

I had a client once who was a CPA. He was not worried about being number one in the search results of Google, Yahoo or MSN. All he wanted was to rank high in his area when someone typed a relevant keyword and his website showed up for that search.

If you are a small business owner who wants to be found locally, you can choose the area that you want to target through your Google Adwords Pay Per Click. In this way, you will minimize your advertising spend and have targetted advertising only for that particular area.

Also be sure to have a form on your site which captures all your visitors names and contact information.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves finetuning and constant link building to get to your goal. Each business has a different goal and an SEO needs to use intuitiveness to deliver the best service for his/her customers.

Online SEO Tools

There are online tools which you can use to track customers who visit your site. It gives you information of -

Which country they come from?
The screen resolution they use
Which sites do they come from?
IP addresses of visitors
How long do they remain on the site?
What pages do they visit?
If buying, when did they change their mind about buying the product?
How many visitors per day?

With all this information at their fingertips, it revolutionizes the way businesses can influence their customers. They can take advantage of customer behaviours, likes, dislikes, wishlists (if any) and enhance the user experiences in a thousand ways.
An example of an online tool is the Google Analytics. All you need to do is put the code that Google gives you, to each page of your HTML code which is important in the user experience. Then track it by using the maps and graphs that Google provides. It has information suitable to a marketing person, an executive or a webmaster. With the varied level of details, it is easy to select what you want to see, monitor it for some days and then make necessary changes to your site.
This is a powerful way where website owners can get to know their customers better and in the long run increase sales and convert leads by optimizing their site. Search engine optimization for ecommerce sites is a powerful tool that all website owners are beginning to see value in.