Do Search Engines Index Flash?

For years the problem with Flash has been that it is practically invisible to search engines. What use was your beautifully designed, interactive web experience when the end user couldn’t find it?

Sure there are best practice guidelines, html tips and JavaScript tricks, but wouldn’t it be better if the search engine spider could just ‘see’ your content?

Well, maybe it can. Adobe recently announced that it has teamed up with major search engines – including Google and Yahoo – to “enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines”. Google added in their blog that they had already begun indexing Flash content on websites.

Excellent! So now we can embed flash functionality everywhere! Unfortunately, no.

While your SWF files can now be crawled, the spider will only see plain text, labels and links, and there is no detail given on what weight these carry in page ranking calculations. The spider remains ‘blind’ to images, FLVs, vectors and dynamic information. There are no SEO staples like headlines, paragraphs or alt tags, and plenty of Flash isn’t even crawlable because Google won’t execute the JavaScript many sites use to load it. But it can read text, and that’s something.

So the searchbot’s Flash-blindness isn’t entirely cured, but it has received a rudimentary pair of plain-text viewing spectacles, the implications of which should not be underestimated. And let’s not forget those tips, tricks and guidelines either:

• Visit the Adobe Flash accessibility page
• Use SwfObject and create alternate content so that everyone can view your site in some form
• Split full flash sites into separate html pages. Use XML and FlashVars to maintain consistency and style.- Use actual text in your movie where possible
• Use xhtml content injection with flashvars to inject html text as variables in your SWF
• Create useful title and meta description tags for the page holding your SWF
• Do not forget the importance of links - see how many major brands use a full-flash site, barely bother with SEO and are still ranked number 1

Yes search engines now index flash, but no, this doesn’t signal the beginning of a new wave of rich-media dominance, or give you an excuse to Flash-ify every part of your content. For most, Flash SEO is essentially the same as before, just a little bit better. And I fully expect it will get better still.

Mark

The Digital World of SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an often debated topic simply because the dominant search engines hold their ranking secrets close their chests. In this blog, I aim to look at a model created to help you think about your website in relation to the Internet landscape and make use of the two simple underlying but powerful topics that are the foundation to the whole strategy - text and links. This principle focuses on natural search listings.

The headings fit into a tidy acronym which it easy to remember: PACT – Preparation, Aspirations, Catwalk and Text.

Preparation

Preparing yourself for the web is about understanding the digital world you are about to embark on. Don’t limit yourself to just your vertical market, look outside and see what others are doing to achieve common principles such as user experience and relationship building. Armed with this insight, look at your competitor’s sites carefully and find out what they are doing really well and where they could benefit from the vast array of digital functionality. Do they have RSS? A blog? Do they show their case studies clearly and give the user insight into what they do? Some key points to this are listed below:

• Pay attention to how the sites ‘share’ their information with the Internet – after all, those who send more, receive more!

• Your users are interested in the substance of what you offer as opposed to who you are and what you say you can do. Prove to them that you have substance, through trials, videos, excerpts and user feedback/ratings (remember negative ratings can be a good thing since they give you a chance to reply and show how genuine you are).

• Work out your income method: is it advertising, membership sales, product sales or are you selling a service. Be realistic about conversion rates which can typically be 1% on ecommerce sites and know you need millions of page views each month to gain advertiser interest. Sites like the SitePoint marketplace can be useful to sell advertising whilst you are building up your traffic profile.

• Install stats such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to follow your indexing and learn how the search engine spiders are reading your content.

Aspirations

Your aspirations sit directly beneath your brand. These are the keywords on how you wish to be perceived as a business. Are you unique, sassy, exciting, edgy, strong, leading etc… Build a profile of words that you want your customers to associate with your brand. Everything you then do as a business must adhere to these brand values. Some key points are:

• Use these words to direct viral campaigns, blog entries, website copy, imagery and other material whether it is on or offline.

• Actively use social media like YouTube, StumbleUpon, Flickr and PhotoBucket to engage with users who like to browse unusual and viral digital media. Remember to place keywords (see ‘Text’ below) in any links back to your site since these sites are held in high regard by search engines.

• If you have a small budget, at least consider a professional design of your site. The subconscious affect of a decent design can speak thousands of words and gain instant trust from a user. One trick is to familiarise yourself with well known like-sites and adopt similar styles.

Catwalk

This interesting topic has been around in the offline world for generations but lends a great hand to a social media strategy. Large clothing brands often demonstrate their creative fashion skills on a catwalk. Most of the clothing does not hit the high street stores but the creativity/uniqueness on display helps drive brand awareness. This is true of car companies who take part in F1 or frequently produce concept cars demonstrating innovation and direction. It makes them stand out.This is key to any viral campaign or social media strategy where high quality inbound links are built at great speed. Listed below are a few things you can think about for your catwalk element:

• A blog can capture an audience when written well and frequently. A blog allows you to inform customers of upcoming products/services, showing them that the company is ‘alive’ and developing. A blog can be an instrumental part of creating a long tail so it is important that they are written well and with keywords in mind. Social sites that you can get benefit from include blogger.com, digg.com, del.icio.us and technorati.com who are massive content aggregators made up of vast web communities. Consider using WordPress or Blogger to set up your blog.

• With the domestication of broadband, Internet speeds allow for the syndication of video and rich media. It is very easy to post a video on YouTube and embed it into your site. Consider putting time and effort into making use of this vast Internet TV channel where it is free to advertise. Depending on your business, there should be a large amount of video ideas you can come up with and make you stand out a little more from your competitors.

• Consider the use of Flash to create a game or competition for your users to take part in. Large brands continue to develop promotional sites to reinforce their values and drive awareness to their brand and gather email addresses for future promotions/newsletters

Text

Last but certainly not least is the ‘Text’ element of your site. Arguably, this falls to Preparation but due to the scale of the topic, I have separated it here. The main concept behind text is relevance. You want to aim for a low ‘bounce rate %’ (the rate at which users exit your site without visiting more than one page). Some key tips for optimising the text on your website:

• Use tools such as Google Keyword Tool to find out the traffic volumes on relevant keywords. This useful tool will show you search volumes and likely keyword targets. For example; If more people are searching ‘Vans’ than ‘Commercial Vehicles’ then you would use the word ‘Vans’ with prominence over ‘Commercial Vehicles’.

• Include title, meta keywords and meta description on every page and aim for unique and highly specific descriptions for the content of that page. Sometimes it is impossible to uniquely markup each page but where possible make use of article/product titles and synopsis/short descriptions within the meta data of the page.

• Consider the use of a tag cloud. Not only do these ‘shout’ to the user what is popular/most listed on the site, they are great for search engines and contain targeted hyperlinked words linked to relevant results.

• Make sure any inbound links you control (such as those on the social media sites) contain relevant keywords to the page they are linking to and in addition to this, make sure those words get high search volumes from the research you would have conducted above.

• Use modern coding standards (XHTML and CSS - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/seo). This minimises the amount of code used to create the page and provides a clean presentation layer for search engines to easily index your site. Also, think about the logical structure of your content making use of headings, sub-headings and bulleted/numbered lists.

• Use title/alt tags on images and name your images with descriptive keywords. Image searches such as Google Image search can provide a substantial amount of traffic.

So in summary, SEO is the sum of its parts and it is important to focus on each the above with the same intensity. The Internet is a ‘network of networks’ so everything you do has a ripple effect that can in turn improve your SEO. There is one more element that supports all of the above and that is frequency. The more frequently you can produce a blog, a video, an image etc... the greater the expanse of inbound links and search keywords that lead to your site (also known as the ‘Long Tail’ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html). User Generated Content (UGC) can aid in automating much of this but that is for another day…

David

Hosting and SEO - can they be related?

In a word YES! I am not referring to any PPC (pay per click) models but the natural search listings that show your website listing within the results pages of search engines.

I intend to cover two points : 1 – The impact on SEO from hosting and 2 – What to look for in a hosting company to maximise your results.

Did you know...?

Search engines evaluate all websites based on a number of factors. This evaluation aims to do four main things for the search engine results:
• Ensure quality and relevance of results
• Avoid duplication of results
• Avoid delivery of multiple results from the same basic provider
• Avoid delivery of untrustworthy results

This is fundamental to all search engines and as a result, hosting plays an important part of this.

A good hosting provider is of course a focal point for the web site success. Traditionally when looking at a hosting partner you would have to look at elements such as space, bandwidth, level of service, speed, however today, SEO hosting is proving to be just as important. A good point to note is that PPC works globally, natural listings from spiders and bots will not work without some form of local hosting.

The impacts on hosting can be severe to your site and its search listings – As a general rule of thumb the following apply.

Server uptime

Imagine Google spiders your 100,000 page site and one day finds 10,000 pages are not working. Those pages will drop from the index until Google crawls them successfully again. If each page had good rankings, each might send 1 visitor per day? - suddenly you have lose 10,000 unique visitors per day from your site even though your main keywords are still ranking highly.

Multiple domains

Multiple domains hosted on the same server indicate to the search engines that they might belong to the same company. Links from multiple domains hosted with the same provider indicate artificial link building with the aim of influencing search results. If you are hosting multiple sites on one IP and linking from one to another, prepare to be de-listed.

You pay for what you get

Websites hosted with blacklisted hosting companies are likely to be unreliable. Pay for it!! free hosting can be slow, unreliable and have bandwidth limitations.

Location

Most importantly, the location of the website host provides the search engine with information about the location of the business and thereby enables it to provide more relevant results based on location of searchers.

For example, a website hosted in London is more likely to be relevant to a person searching for a service in London than a website hosted in New York. If you are in New York and search for a book shop, you would expect results local to you or at least American.

Ideally, if you want a ranking on Google in America, you need a physical presence out there, or at least an IP address that is related to the territory in question.

There are 2 common approaches to obtaining this IP address…

Mirror your infrastructure in the territory you want to be listed or use a CDN (Content delivery Network) with dynamic elements coming from centralised server.

Mirroring your infrastructure is a neat solution for smaller low traffic sites. If the site is dynamic in nature, you can have each territory pulling relevant information from a centralised database. A single web server located in the USA will give you natural listings in that region. However, from a web site owner’s perspective, you have a single point of failure in that region, perhaps the need for additional internal support staff but you do have lower costs than using a CDN.





A CDN is the easy solution for high traffic sites that need scalability and reliability 24/7. CDN’s are used extensively by Disney, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to name but a few. For those web site users in the the UK entering http://www.microsoft.com/ into their browser window, they are published a copy of the site form the UK through a CDN. A CDN is more expensive than an internally managed solution if using a single server but does provide benefits in speed, bandwidth availability and uptime. There is no single point of failure.

A few companies offer CDN networks. Akamai is probably the best know due its high profile clients, but other providers such as NTT Europe have similar products. The NTT Eurpore product is called the SCD ( Smart Content Delivery) and is described in this image.




Once you have your hosting model established, you need to be aware of certain points with your hosting provider to maximise natural listings. These include

Can you have 302 and 301 redirects?
If you have a web presence and then move your url to something new as a result of an internal rebrand, you still need all the search engine links of your old site to go to your new site. 301 and 302 redirects are the search engine friendly way of doing this without affecting your listings.

Can you create custom 404 errors?
If a page is not found on your server from when a user clicks a link through, generally they will hit the back button in the browser and go back to the search results page and select the next link. If you can create a 404 page not found result that is branded and has a site search bar, they may stay in your site and not go back to the search engine results page.

To Summarise:

• Don’t use free hosting for any commercial enterprise

• Get a unique IP for each web site you own.

• Use dedicated servers if possible.

• Host servers in the territories you wish to be listed. CDN or local hosting,

• Get 99.9% uptime guaranteed.

• Ask for whitelisted SEO friendly servers

• Ensure you have enough control of your server set up.

2008 – the year of getting social online…

Getting your website found online isn’t just about PPC and SEO. Now often termed ‘traditional’ online marketing tools, they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wealth of digital marketing tools available.

So where do you start? Why not with one of the most talked about phenomenon in recent months – Social Media…

What is Social Media?

Social Media is the marketing term that has been given to the new breed of online websites that facilitate greater interaction with an online audience. Social Media sites allow two-way interaction between online content owners and their audience. It enables website visitors to engage, interact and contribute to content. It also enables site owners to syndicate content out to other sites and online channels, and gives them the ability to easily aggregate relevant, related content from other sources into their own sites.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is the term given to the tools and techniques that form the core of many Social Media sites and channels. Techniques such as Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Syndication, RSS, and Aggregation are some of the popular terms that you may have heard of; however there are also many more available to you as a business.

What does this mean to you as a business?

By empowering your audience with the ability to contribute to the content on your site, you will gradually build a strong relationship with them and develop brand loyalty. The web is no longer a faceless medium. In doing this, you will become an authority in your market sector and you will build trust through personal recommendation and the informed opinions available on your site. Your employees will feel more valued through recognition of their contribution and you will build a more personal bond with your customers through better engagement on a real-time level.

How can I use Social Media?

A clearly defined Social Media strategy will identify the Social Media channels that will best engage your stakeholders, from employees and clients, to suppliers and investors.

So what can I do?

Here are a few tried and tested techniques that you can use to start embracing social media:

1. Write a blog

You’re reading this one, so that’s proof enough that they work! Blogs are a great way of informally communicating with your audience, and they cost nothing more than your time! They’ll also improve your SEO, which is always a good thing!

2. Get Digging

Add social bookmarking tools to all of your news and product pages which will allow your visitors to easily bookmark and share your content with their own networks. Sites such as Digg and del.icio.us are a good starting point.

3. YouTube

Youtube now receives more traffic than Google.com. That’s proof enough that user generated content (UGC) is fuelling the new web. Try and think of unique and novel ways that you can use YouTube to promote your products and services.

4. Twitter

Twitter is a great way of keeping tabs on your friends, colleagues and workforce. Many people don’t get it initially, but once you do, you’ll be hooked!

5. Get Networking

Sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook are amazing resources for getting in touch with people, generating leads, raising brand awareness and much more. They’re also becoming powerful business to business (B2B) tools, enabling companies to effortlessly communicate with their stakeholders.

So how do I know what to use?

That’s where we come in. With a wealth of digital marketing experience, we’re the right people to talk to about all of the above and more. To see what Bluhalo Evolve can do for your business online, please drop me an email: oliver@bluhalo.com

More top tens?

For those of you who read our blog regularly, you may be wondering why we have had so many top tens recently.

Well, there is a good reason for it! For starters, top tens are great for SEO - Google loves them! But that's not our only motivation. Top tens are a great way of making yourself commit to the really important things. If asked to write about your area of expertise, chances are you could write a lot, an awful lot! So, to get to what's really important, we're sticking to ten items, the top ten from each area of expertise. That way, you get to find out the best of the best from our industry expertise!

Keep checking back as there's still a few more to come plus loads more news and views from the team here at Bluhalo!