Search Engine Optimisation

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.

Download your FREE ultimate guide to facebook marketing here.

Christmas is a time to relax and let go… forget your diet and eat everything you can…

Well it isn’t really but thats how it turns out for many millions, they aim to continue or start a diet at this time of year but slip up… its natural it’s christmas a time for enjoyment and stuffing your face a little more than normal.

Anyway I’ve been working with Kaloss Trimmers to increase sales on a new diet website of the same name. The site doesn’t have many products (just over 50!) but the few it does have are amazing and are all proven to help you on your diet – don’t be funny i’m not talking about nail files, scented candles or anything like that!

As I was talking with the team and a few of the clients they have I’ve managed to grab some little hints and tips that will help you out this festive season to keep the weight off.

5 Christmas Diet Tips

1. Quality Over Quantity – champagne and salmon NOT beer and kebabs!
2. Avoid a Real Stuffing – drink lots of water before your meals, it will fill you up so you can’t eat so much! (it’s free and zero calories)
3. Dance The Night Away – at a party? then dance, boogey on down to the beats because its exercise and burns off excess calories!
4. Don’t Give Something Up at New Year – unless its smoking, keep your treats just cut back and make them a well earned treat rather than a once or twice a day treat!
5. Shop After Eating – this stops impulse sweetie purchases and/or beer purchases …saving your money and helping you loose weight!

So with these tips this festive season should hopefully be a little easier, however if all else fails (and for a few it will) then why not get a head start with the help of Kaloss Trimmers Carbohydrate Blockers (Phase2 XTRA).

And if all else fails in the new year why not try one of the amazing vibrating plates from Kaloss Trimmers (at exclusive prices!)

This post was sponsored by Kaloss Trimmers – Sorry but sometimes even the best have to sell their souls.

After what I must say 3 days of hellish stress, if i’m honest I didn’t really feel like writing an article today.  However, my friend Sarah has written an article in my place. So I hope you enjoy this, please do leave your comments & follow Sarah on Twitter.

How can you talk to hundreds of thousands of people including celebrities without leaving your house? Twitter of course!

Twitter is one of the most used web phenomena that has captured the attention of so many people using 140 characters to blog comments and issues that affect them and what things they are thinking.

It has been the centre of all social networks, it is the daddy of them all in pro-actively mini-blogging news. You can gain so much information on a huge variety of things by following different people. Now that a collection of celebrities ranging from singers to sportsmen and artists to actors are on Twitter we can now enjoy talking to and reading their messages.

Having contact with these types of people makes things easier for us normal people to raise awareness of things for charity. For example if you are campaigning for or against something you could ask a celebrity to support it. As long as they believe it is a good cause they will RT (retweet) the message and they can potentially thousands of supporters for the cause. It is amazing and it actually works.

Beverley Knight and @bibiccharity

One really important person that is a semi-celeb is Janis Sharp: www.twitter.com/JanisSharp

Her son Gary McKinnon has Aspergers Syndrome like me and Janis is a great person to get involved with because she cares about sufferers on the spectrum. She has done a hell of a lot of campaigning for her son in the recent months/years to try and get people to understand Aspergers and what it is like. I myself have told my favourite celebrities, via Twitter, about my Aspergers and they all seem to be comfortable with it and accept it.

The other thing with celebrities once they are on Twitter is you see them in a different light. Before Adam Woodyatt and Beverley Knight were on there I had always said I liked their artwork/music, but being able to chat to them is a totally whole new and exciting story. They are both polite and frankly very funny to chat to! It gives fans a real sense that the celebrities are actually pretty normal people and that is a very important thing.

Twitter is so friendly it is untrue and it is largely to do with the nature of the site. People Tweet useful and interesting/exciting things. I think it is an amazing idea and I hope whatever happens with Twitter over the next few years will send it into the history books as being the most informative blogging tool on the net.

This is a guest post written by Aaron Irizarry, of www.thisisaaronslife.com . Aaron is a creative geek, he is passionate not only about web design but also web development. I would like to thank Aaron for this article and hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

Working for a local search marketing company has had its benefits over the last year and a half. Not only have I had the opportunity to grow as a web designer, I’ve expanded my skill set to project management, user interface, and user experience design and control. I would have to say that the most valuable lesson that I have learned is the ability to combine Search Engine Optimization with design.

Now we all know that we need to optimize our sites to get them better ranking both in the local and organic arenas. Most of the time we leave this to others, but as designers if we are conscious of some of the major components that make up a well optimized site we can remove most of the extra effort by designing for optimization.

So what can we do as designers that will value / enhance optimization?

1)     Design for content.

One of the most important components of good optimization is valuable content. As we are designing it is important that we focus on content, knowing that content is king. So during the design process we should make sure to be informing our clients about the value of content, helping them understand its value to what we are designing as well as its importance to optimization.

“A website without a content strategy is like a speeding vehicle without a driver. Learn why content matters and how to do it right.” ~ A List Apart

2)     Building Sound Architecture.

When laying out a site keep in mind that the architecture needs to be sound. Once coded, does the layout lend to the search engine crawlers being able to crawl the site easily? Is there a solid internal link structure?  As designers, we need to keep architecture at the forefront of our designs; our content will not be used to its full potential if we are not building it around a solid foundation. Using internal links within our relevant content will help the crawlers to visit the pages within our site more frequently.

Not all of us code the designs we create, and at times the site structure has been predetermined, but we have the ability to influence the architecture by our design concepts… We must strive for solid architecture whenever possible.

3)     Don’t Put a Square Peg In a Round Hole.

Know when and where to use your tags, especially <h> tags. Not every title on your page should be an <h1> tag; learn about how to use your tags to effectively guide the crawlers through your site. Find creative ways to display your headings, either by using negative margins, or clean styling. Avoid using images for your headings unless you are using an image replacement technique.

Besides tags it is also important to know when to use graphics in our links. When creating buttons it is important to remember that anchored links are another important element to optimization, especially in the link building process. As designers it is our responsibility to use creative techniques via css or otherwise to add visual appeal to our buttons without sacrificing optimization.
  
Conclusion

As designers/developers we may not fully understand SEO, that is ok, it is not for us to master optimization (though the more we know the better) but instead to obtain a nice firm grasp of the basics. By doing this we can better equip our clients to get the most out of the product we are delivering, whether we are helping with the optimization, or someone else is taking it on, the least we can do is design the site so it is optimization friendly.

Granted I am no expert on SEO but just by increasing my knowledge base I have been able to improve the services that I offer my clients.

Thanks to Andy for the opportunity to contribute,

~ Aaron I

Article Editor – JGeary