Flash may be one of the prettier things on a website but are becoming more important and popular on the Internet. Flash websites are not exactly SEO-friendly.
Using Flash is fine but you need to remember some golden rules to make a search engine ‘see’ it and index it properly. Google are slowly coming to terms with the importance of indexing Flash, but I think keeping it simple is still the way to go!
Search engines find new content by following hyperlinks. Use HTML-based hyperlinks pointing to all of the other content on your website (even if it uses Flash), and you will automatically get an improved user experience! Also make your title tag have meaningful description is key to having a user get an idea about your site before they continue to surf.
My first site was with Geocities and at the start it didnt have any Flash until later on. I was just having flash as the main site at one point and it proved a real sucess to my Flash abilities and I learned lots.
My Flash design didnt last that long but I wanted to experiment with other layouts but the positive points I found with using Flash are:
- You can keep things in one ‘window’ and it wont whiz off to another page and have to reload everything again.
- You can make beautiful preloaders and entertain guests whilst it loads with a funky graphic!
- You can impliment Flash movie clips within the design and showcase things when the user may be reading about something else. A good idea is to maybe make a screen ticker that you can have across the top of the screen.
Flash is all about moving forward with design and whilst having a site with no Flash is boring I think a site with some flash may be better now as I am thinking more about the way that my users see the site and not for it to be ‘all singing all dancing’. This is since I researched about the indexing.
A disappointing thing about 100% Flash websites is that the positioning on screens can be a nightmare. That is a negative reason why I started coming away from website designing in Flash only. I feel that using this technology has given me steady knowledge into further projects I may take on or if I want to have a single element from my flash site I can do so!
Article Written by: GoldChoiceUK is a young web designer based on the south coast of the UK. You can see some of her work at GoldChoiceUK or follow her on twitter (@goldchoiceuk). GCUK also runs the DSHeaven Blog, lots of Nintendo reviews.
OK 500,000,000 users but can it really drive traffic to your website?
You have built your Facebook Fan Page in the vain hope that someone somewhere will say “wow” and share it with all their friends, and their friends and so on and so forth. It would be great if that was all you needed to do, there would be no need for this post to start off with!
You may check your analytics daily to see if anyone has visited your website from your Facebook page, or post links to your latest blog post hoping for visitors to crash your website server that the traffic is so huge! Sadly you need to do a little more than that to a) gain more fans b) find the fans that will promote it for you and c) integrate your Fan Page into your long term SEO strategy.
Build Links back to your site
The majority of links from Facebook are no follow. The one place you will get a link back from is your Facebook Fan Page Wall, so make sure you put your URL in the “write something about…” box under your profile picture (no need to add http:// anymore!)
I say “majority” as I am still testing this, however I have discovered that use of anchor text in your blog post that has been imported to the Notes tab of your Fan Page, will result in these links have a do-follow (although redirected). So importing your blog posts to the Notes tab not only increases your visibility on Facebook and gets fans to interact there and then with the post without having to visit your website, but you are building more back links using relevant keywords, everyday to your site.
Install a Facebook “like” button on your website
Every time a user of Facebook clicks a like button this zooms into their friends Newsfeed and is posted to their Profile page. Wallah a whole host of potential new visitors to your site now have a link to click through to. To put this into perspective lets say the average Facebook user has around 200 fans. Your site has just been put into their newsfeed, 5 people click through and 2 of those “like” your site as well. Now your site is in front of 600 potential new visitors…and so it goes on. As an example, I recently wrote a Facebook News story that gained 14 likes and 98 visitors within a couple of hours from Facebook alone. Now that is the power of Facebook viral marketing!
Interact with your Facebook Fans
You’ve gained your new fans, now what on earth do you do with them? Interact, ask questions, and most importantly praise those fans that DO interact with you. Return the favour, do they have a Fan Page too that they are trying to promote? Pop over to their page and interact with them there.
Be helpful, don’t be too self promotional. Share other businesses posts on your page (do any of your fans run a business? Have they posted any recent blog posts lately?)
Put your Facebook Page in your signature
How many forums do you visit everyday? I bet you only have a link to your Website and Twitter account at best. Add your Fan Page now! Remember the more fans n your page, the more interaction, the more traffic is driven to your website. Don’t just stop at forums either! If you write a guest blog or two, and articles that are distributed across the web, place a link in your author bio too.
If you need more inspiration on how to improve your Facebook Fan Page and in turn increase the traffic to your website then download a copy of The Essential Facebook Fan Page Marketing Guide packed with useful tips to help you do just that! Thanks to SEOAndy you are one step closer to finding out how Facebook can work for your business. Why not pop over and tell me about your experience on my Facebook Page?
Article & Guide Written By: Emma Ewers is an Internet Marketing VA specialising in Facebook Marketing, SEO and general Internet Marketing services for businesses. She offers a 4 week Internet Marketing Program for any business looking to improve their return in how they use online resources to promote themselves and connect with customers. You will often find her lurking on Twitter (@emmaewers) and Facebook or Blogging about her next big Facebook find on the IMVA website.
We all know its a little bit of a task to understand how search engines work, never mind try to explain it to someone else. So I’ve decided on 2 roots to explain how search works, today is the first – a simplified over view of how search works, the second will come in a few weeks in the form of a somewhat detailed guide to how search works and how you can improve your site to make the most of the known search mechanisms.
So without further ramblings…
Search Engines and more accurately their algorithms have always been something of a mystery. As the saying says; there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Basically this means there are certain things we know, certain things we know change and things we’ve no idea exist as SEO’s because algorithms can change any seconds (and generally do) making for many more variables than you may think. Confused yet? If not, just wait a few moments as you continue to read this article.
This overview takes you from your content creation to search queries to the results page.
From Generation to Consumption
1. You create a new blog post / web page / add some content to some website
2. Search Bot crawling the web finds this content
Search Bots (SB’s like google bot) will follow links on website and so if you have no or few links you are unlikely to be crawled.
SB’s won’t index pages and directories if told not to by a robots.txt file.
If a link has a rel=”nofollow” attribute SB’s wont index the linked page.
SB’s may also find pages on your site using a sitemap (a specialised XML file).
The more links a page has from higher ranking websites you have the better your quality score will be in the index. (as long as these linked aren’t nofollows)
3. Once crawled, shortly after another bot will come along and index the content.
Meta tags (title, description etc) are considered to be stored in one index, used for broad match searching.
“on page” content is believed to live in another index, used for more obscure long tail searches.
It is important to remember, when you are searching you are not searching the active web, but rather a cache (store) of the web that the search engine holds internally – this is to stop SEO’s manipulating the index easily.
4. The search engine will then estimate your ranking, generally based on links to the content (though not always).
5. The search engine will cross check the content with the policies of engine.
Web spam teams double check for real content, test the search algorithms and refines it.
Google uses over 10K testers (normally in India I believe) to test the quality of results.
Search Engines then check for spam reports.
6. User send a search query (searches the index)
In reality you aren’t just searching one index of the engine but multiple indexes and factors of the search engine.
During this process Google suggests relevant keywords.
7. Initial search results are shown.
Google may show billions in the index of relevance, but only the top 10K are generally shown.
Localised Search Results – google and bing will use your IP location to show localised results higher in the results.
8. Results are shown in accordance to search ranking, authority and duplicates are removed.
The big search engines use the keywords of the search to find adverts and include these in the relevant hotspots of the results page.
Many search engines also offer refinement tools alongside the results, such as “blogs”, “news” & “social” offering the user ease of access to data they want.
Multiple pages from same domain are likely to be grouped together (“clustered results”)
Trending sites (locally/nationally) move up the index temporarily.
User personalisation – google will add your previous results searches and click through (clicks to website) into the results page, putting your most viewed and searched pages at the top.
9. The final results pages (serp’s) are shown to the user.
From submission of a query to the results page showing take less than 100 milliseconds (generally).
This crawl, index, rank & search route is the same for most types of content.
10. Search is a huge industry so what is said above is always changing to some extent, most of it stays the same but there are extra variables outside of the 9 steps above … such as how fast your content is indexed, how you achieve getting links, who you link to (apparently), whether you are known through social media … also websites/blogs etc are linked via the algorithms to your social media profiles … for example try searching your name your site and your twitter page may show up!
Do you have any questions about how search engines work? or how to get to the top of Google? simply tweet me @andykinsey or leave a comment below
MBS Electrical, an electrical installation, repair and maintenance company based in Manchester have a new website, designed by Andy Kinsey Designs. (They also have a bunch of new stationary designed by us too!)
The New MBS Electrical Website - Design by Andy Kinsey Designs
The site is designed to meet the needs of the client as always, adding more functionality than the previous website designed by Yell.com / the Yellow Pages – the site can be found at http://www.mbselectrical.co.uk
Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.
WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms in the world, and of course WP is also the most commonly used open source blogging tool in the world. Considering this it will be no surprise that I know many people who use the system (I help bug fix and build templates for some of them), and also it is no surprise that I get bombarded with questions about the system. The most common of which is, What plugins can I use to help SEO on my wordpress blog?
Well, given there are a huge number of so called SEO plugins for wordpress this isn’t the easiest question to answer. Having played around with wordpress for several years now and become something of a WP geek I have of course played with many SEO plugins. However, As the title of this post suggests I do have a number of favourite plugins to use, and they are listed below
All In One SEO
This plugin is by far and away my favourite, not only is it simple to use and install but it is also customisable in the key areas that matters. Along with several other plugins by the great Micheal Torbert All in One is an utterly superb tool that I advise all wordpress users to implement. – Get the Plugin
Google XML Sitemap Generator
This plugin creates (and updates) a Google XML sitemap, pings various services (including Bing, Ask & Yahoo), allowing for your blog/website to be better indexed by search engines. This tool is created by another great wordpress plugin developer Arne Brachold. – Get the Plugin.
Similar Posts
This plugin compares your posts, and creates a list of what it considers to be the most related or relevant similar posts – this can then be outputted with your posts and in your feed. This is a valuable internal linking mechanism, developed by Mr Rob Marsh. – Get the Plugin
WordTwit
This plugin generates a tweet output direct from wordpress, and also includes bit.ly and Google (analytics) Urchin integration. This is a light weight tool and works amazingly well – so much better than many of the bulkier plugins I’ve seen and played with. WordTwit was developed by BraveNewCode. – Get the Plugin
Well earlier this week (13th July 2010) ComScore released it’s June 2010 search engine statistics. ComScore release these figures once a month, they use an ever changing formula to create more and more accurate results. The statistics are in essence related to the number of searches conducted by each search engine. So what did the results say?
Well as expected, Google top the chart – with 62.6% of the current market share, a loss of 1.1% from May 2010. Google was then followed by Yahoo! (18.9% up 0.6% from May). In third place was Bing (formerly MSN) with a growth of 0.6% taking Bing to an ever growing market share of 12.7%. In fourth remains ASK search network, at 3.6% and with no change from the previous month. Finally, in fifth is AOL who suffered a loss of 0.1% taking them to just 2.2% of the search market.
So what does this all mean?
Well clearly it means that the search market is changing, no longer is MSN (now bing) the stick in the mud that wouldn’t change. But the important thing of note here is that Bing continues to grow, and with Bing taking over the search functionality of Yahoo! later this year, Bing (using todays figures) would have a market share of 31.6% – a truly staggering thought and something that I believe means now is the time to take note of Bing (and not to wait several months) for SEO’s. So with this in mind, it is now time to Love the Bing.
But it isn’t just SEO’s that need to take note it is other search engines, and this is something Google are already doing (almost in fear it feels). With lasts months role out of background images, Google made a move to be “more like” Bing – but after much uproar in the first few seconds of being live, Google decided unlike Bing having a default image wasn’t a good idea and it is now optional.
The one thing the results do not show is that the world is showing an exponential growth of mobile search. With the advent and influence of the iPhone, Blackberry and Android’s of the world this isn’t going to slow down any time soon and is a huge target market. However, without specific results we can only presume that search is in the same proportions – though I know at least in the UK blackberry (and anyone on the Three mobile network) searches are defaulted to Yahoo!, android in 90% of cases I believe are pointed at Google (the creators) … as for apple I also see these guys using Google … So sorry bing but you need to get up and make some deals – message here is if your mobile focused target Google mobile and Yahoo mobile.
Now before we begin, you must read the warnings below.
This page is NOT advice.
These tactics are NOT legitimate, you will be banned if caught using them.
Do NOT use these tactics or let your SEO use them on your site.
Black Hat SEO refers to the tactics used by some nasty SEO companies in order to “trick” search engines into ranking part of or a whole site illegitimately. There are many black hat SEO techniques, now I will only be mentioning the major few below – but there are many many others, so if your not sure ask me (@andykinsey on twitter). One little thing of note, sometimes these tactics will see you rise in the rankings for a matter of minutes, hours or days, but if you get caught you will be penalised or banned (your other sites may also suffer the same fate due to their relation).
My reasoning for this post is not to enable you to “trick” the search engines, it is simply to warn you of these tactics and to tell you that if any SEO ever recommends these actions (or maybe claims a “special relationship” with a search engine) … tell them to “go away” otherwise you may pay a very high price.
Note: Many of the tactics below have been simplified by many SEO/webmasters for implementation, many have also been made more complex to avoid easy capture of the tactics by search engines – I’ve decided to explain the principles and not how to implement them.
Black Hat SEO is No GO!
Keyword Stuffing
This I would say is the most commonly found form of spamming search engines. Generally you will find 3 forms of this: hundreds of meta keywords, highly stuffed content (keyword density 50%+) & footer spam (hundreds of keywords and links in footer). As you can tell Keyword Stuffing is essentially the use of a large number of keywords in any given area, primarily in the hope search engines will believe this is relevant content. However, I can tell you most search engines (especially the big ones) use 2 forms of checking for real content 1) human content reviewers 2) algorithms to check for similar words and anything that maybe considered “odd” language – generally point 2 will flag a link to a reviewer (1). Of course, Keyword Stuffing also goes hand in hand with “hidden text”.
Hidden Text
Hidden Text refers primarily to the hiding of text by changing it’s colour to match the background, however this is not the only way to achieve the effect of text not being visible (for instance hiding the text millions of pixels off a page or hiding text with CSS display notes). Most webmasters and SEO’s will know that if you hide something with the tactics above are easily detectable by search engines, this is good, what isn’t so good is that they still think some tricks around hiding text with images won’t be caught. It will it is blatant spam! and the search engines will catch you. Also if you are in a highly competitive industry and your site is under any real scrutiny you will find you will be reported for both hiding text and stuffing your keywords by competitors (usually within days).
Cloaking Content
In essence cloaking refers to the dark art of showing one piece of content to the user, and another piece of content to search engines. Generally this tends not to be whole pages as this is extremely easy to detect but rather in general the replacement of elements such as adverts or images on any given page, so where a user see’s an advert Google may see extra textual content. There are of course many many other methods of cloaking but this is the most common form.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are simple pages added to a website to target a specific keyword or keyphrase, generally they offer little or zero value to the user – they are simply a link-through page. As said above they target a specific phrase or term which is targeted in the hope that users will land on the pages from search engines, they will then proceed to the homepage or some content which may or may not be relevant to the user (indeed this is how a lot of malware gets onto peoples computers). This can be a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.
Redirection from a Doorway
Now generally redirection in itself can be dangerous for SEO, do it incorrectly and you cannot only appear spammy to search engines but you can also see any valid rankings you’ve gained lost through lack of using the right type of redirection. However, this is not the redirection I wish to talk about, no this is the redirection of users from doorways pages to various bits of content (usually you may find this is random, but not always). In essence you are again cloaking, allowing search engines to see your keyword rich doorway page but redirecting users to some content. For as many ways of finding redirections search engines you will find even more ways are being invented to avoid this detection – it’s like a dog chasing it’s tail.
Conclusion
So with these 5 major black hat techniques highlighted, I hope that you will steer clear of them and those who offer such techniques. Do you know any more common-place or not so common black-hat techniques you would like to share? leave a comment below or tweet me (@andykinsey)
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Now there are so so many resources out there, but I want to share my top 5 online resources for web designers, developers and website owners.
Articles & Blog Resources
1 – Smashing Magazine
These guys are simply superb, renowned for the “top ten” lists they role out on a regular basis and of course the experts whom right for the blog, Smashing Mag is always worth a read. Add to this recently they added the Smashing Network of blogs, so now it’s not just Smashing Mag updates you get but also those from other related blogs in the network (only the best blogs). – @smashingmag
2 – Boagworld
Although based around a world famous podcast, the Boagworld website also offers some amazing articles from designers, developer and marketers (including myself) – On top of that you get to see paul boag (the father of web design) rant a little about what is often a nothing subject, but it brings a new non-techie angle which is good. Also the site offers a fairly active forum where all sorts of discussion go on from design discussion to how something works in php. Boagworld is for website owners & recently Paul released “the website owners manual” – a superb reference guide if you have anything to do with a website. – @boagworld
3 – Think Vitamin
From the guys and gals at Carsonified, Think Vitamin is a superb resource for all kinds of things. With topics including business, marketing, design, development, mobile and web apps there is something for everyone here. Also with Think Vitamin radio you can consume materials on the go. The guys at Carsonified also arrange a number of great conferences each year including various future of events. – @carsonified
4 – 37signals
This is a resource I’ve only just began reading on a regular basis, but it’s well worth spending a few minutes taking a look here each week to see if there is anything of relevance to you. 37signals are all about productivity and making things work properly, they are the makers of the now infamous BaseCamp software and amazing web designers working with clients like threadless. – @37signals
5 – A List Apart
This is primarily a designer and developer blog, it isn’t in any way formed for a website owner (it’s far too techie). However, if you are a website designer or developer I seriously advise you subscribe to the RSS and twitter feed, some big names post here and it’s superb. – @alistapart
Top Web Related Tweeters
Here are all the webby type people i suggest you follow if you have anything to do with the internet. Not all will be relevant to everyone but they all have something great to offer!
This list has been formed and outed for you, because I was asked by a fellow designer for my list (and here it is), but now I want to go a step further and want your ideas! so tweet me @andykinsey the resource you favour using, from blogs to css galleries to books, let me know. – Or leave a comment.
Now there are many many SEO and general Internet Marketing myths that are floating around, and have been since the dawn of time. (Ok, dawn of the internet). Today I want to take a look at 15 of the most annoying myths, these are all a complete pile of poop.
Generally you will be told these via huge adverts on a website or over the phone when someone is cold-calling you to try and sell you a service – beware of these commission monkies.
So the 15 Myths which are a load of <insert naughty word> are:
We’re endorsed (or work with) Google / Bing / Yahoo.
Google Analytics spies on you, don’t use it.
Your PageRank (PR) is your search rank (or is highly related too).
You should have as many meta tags as possible.
Having country specific site’s (in different languages) creates duplicate content.
Well as expected, Google top the chart – with 62.6% of the current market share, a loss of 1.1% from May 2010. Google was then followed by Yahoo! (18.9% up 0.6% from May). In third place was Bing (formerly MSN) with a growth of 0.6% taking Bing to an ever growing market share of 12.7%. In fourth remains ASK search network, at 3.6% and with no change from the previous month. Finally, in fifth is AOL who suffered a loss of 0.1% taking them to just 2.2% of the search market.
