Flash and SEO : Best Practice

The world of search engines has evolved over the recent months and still we can't be 100% sure about flash design. It is still hard to get flash web sites spidered and ranked how we would like using the traditional search engine optimisation techniques. The main problem is that the search engines can't index the content in the flash code so they have no way of ranking the website accordingly. The reason for this is that they see the flash as a graphic and cannot always read what is inside it. Your online flash designer should consider the following:

Flash pages and movies

The benefits of flash are:
* Great special effects
* Easy for designers to create impressive animations using images and sound
* Interactive applications which are easy to use for visitors
* Flash works across platforms and browsers
* Flash has excellent accuracy for web designers

The main disadvantages of flash design are:
* Initialy there is a massive learning curve involved
* It can have long load time (which is not so much an issue as in the past due to popularity in broadband continuously improving)
* Some firewalls block flash
* Some stats show that more people would prefer not to use flash (although if everyone had used well designed and developed flash as well as running it on broadband I feel this stat would be different)

When it comes to search engine optimising a flash designed web site you are limited to the following:
* Meta tags – keyword, description, title and research
* Link building – link exchanges, directory submissions, article submissions and press releases

It is best to consider your keywords and see how competitive the market is. If it is not too competitive then you many rank a full flash web site on your chosen keywords but the more competitive the phase the nearer to impossible it gets, although the search engines are improving and may soon be able to read the flash content.

Consider your options?
Consider using flash design for different movies on multiple html pages to give you more pages for visitors to come into your site. This will make it easier for the search engines to pick up content and internal links. This will also give you more pages to concentrate different keywords on helping you to rank in more areas. The downside to doing this is that for every page you create the visitor has to re-download a sometimes large flash file.

The alternetive is to give your visitors the option of viewing a flash or html version so the search engines can read the html version and you can still impress your visitors with the flash version.

To help the search engines index you it is worth considering a half way house and imbedding flash into your html. This gives you a search engine optimised site plus enhanced menus and usability. Obviously you have to consider your internal linking strategy along side this option and try to make navigation which the search engines can read so they can search through your site. Use the flash in places to impress the user but do not hide away your content from the search engines. If you use flash as part of your navigation make sure you add additional text links to allow the search engines to crawl your web site.

Conclusion:
If you want to pursue the full flash option then ensure you research your keywords and make your meta data clear and concise for the search engines. Ensure you have an html home page which is keyword optimised with plenty of readable content for the search engines. Offer a text version of your site that search engines can crawl and put all your efforts into your link building strategy.

For more SEO Information, SEO NEWS, & SEO Techniques log on to Webulletin or you can send mail at webulletin@gmail.com.

Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/38660.html
By Jon Harrison

Author : Prashant Main

SEO / SEM glossary Part 9

This is last part of SEO / SEM Terminologies. If you have any additional terms which are not mentioned here, you can send me at webulletin@gmail.com.

Query - The word (or words) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box.

Rank - How well a particular Web page or website is listed in a search engine’s results.

Residual Earnings - The programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale made by a shopper from their sites, but all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.

ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending) - The amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. For instance, an ROAS of $1 means you're generating $1 in sales for every $1 in advertising spend, and an ROAS of $5 means you generate $5 in sales for every $1 in spending.

ROI (Return On Investment) - The amount of money directly generated by an investment. The higher the sales, the larger the number of shoppers and the greater the profit margin generated by sales, thus the better the ROI.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feed - A data format for syndicating news and other content. People can subscribe to RSS feeds so they will be notified every time content is updated on a particular site.

Search Engine Optimization - The act of altering a website so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The process usually involves choosing targeted and relevant keywords and phrases that will drive traffic to the site.

Server - A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running. For example, "Our mail server is down today, that’s why email isn’t getting out." A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.

Spam (or Spamming) - The electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings, generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

Spyware - A somewhat vague term generally referring to deceitful software that is secretly installed on a user’s computer and that monitors use of the computer in some way without the user’s knowledge or consent. Most spyware tries to get the user to view advertising and/or particular Web pages. Some spyware also sends information about the user to another machine over the Internet.

Storefront - A prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.

Super Affiliates - The top 1 percent of affiliates, based on performance and earnings, that generate the lion's share of the revenue for your program. They are born marketers and are very successful with the affiliate program they promote from their sites.

Targeted Marketing - The act of making the right offers to the right customers at the right time.

Text Link - A link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.

Tracking Method - The way that a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common are by using a unique Web address (URL) for each affiliate, or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant's software. Some programs also use cookies for tracking.

Two-tier - An affiliate marketing model that allows affiliates to sign up additional affiliates below themselves, so that when the second-tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as multilevel marketing, or MLM.

Viral Marketing - The rapid adoption of a product or passing on of an offer to friends and family through word-of-mouth (or word-of-email) networks. Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.

Visitor Segmentation - Differentiating users to a site by categories such as age, sex, etc.

For more SEO Information, SEO NEWS, & SEO Techniques log on to Webulletin or you can send mail at webulletin@gmail.com.

Author : Prashant Main