A question I hear a lot is whether Flash is now search engine friendly.  There was a big buzz around the announcement last year that Google, Yahoo and other SEs were beginning to spider and index Flash.  Is it true?

I’ve never thought so.  Adobe claimed that they had furnished technology to Google and Yahoo that would allow them to extract the text embedded in a Flash file and add it to the indexes like any other text, but I’ve been a skeptic.  Now, in the first post linked below, Damien Bianchi of Adobe basically says that the crawling issue is not yet resolved.  He says that in order for SEs to see text in a Flash file, “the content must be placed in an HTML source.” That doesn’t solve the problem.

To help matters, Adobe has started something in their Developer Center called the Search Engine Optimization Technology Center where there is an accumulating group of posts about how to write Flash for SEO as well as usability. These are useful ideas about how to accommodate to the limits of Flash indexing.   In two recent posts, Bianchi has issued some guidelines for developing with Flash that make more intuitive sense than ‘trust Google and Adobe’.

The overview post is on search optimization for RIAs (rich Internet applications – Flash, AJAX, JavaFX, Silverlight, Curl).  It is a long (for the Internet) article that outlines why Flash isn’t easy to index and offers some ideas about how to get around that.  Included are some nice code examples for our developer friends, as well as a list of techniques for making Flash sites or applications search friendly.  This post is the in-depth version of the second bullet-pointed post that summarizes what to do for those of us who are technically-challenged.

The second post is an SEO for Flash checklist.  Again some of this is technical and means close to nothing to me, but many of these items are clear and useful guides to developing a site using Flash — here’s some points I get:

• Create unique URLs for each section of your Flash movie, using appropriate keywords in each.
• Make sure your main navigation is in HTML.
• Make “strategic design decisions.”  I love this one.  It means: come on folks, don’t be lazy — use Flash to enhance usability in reasonable ways embedded within an HTML-based structure.
• Have a sitemap.xml.
• Have a text-based sitemap page on the site.
• Have a video sitemap (usefully explained as a version of the XML sitemap — I’ll check more into this one).
• Make sure the robots.txt file is up to date.
• Avoid popups to run your Flash content — the robots won’t see it.

Flash is one of the most wonderful applications going for usability — it looks beautiful and works well.  Use it strategically and you can have both usability and search engine visibility.

People like video online. The growth of broadband has changed the way we organize content — we’re not in text anymore, Dorothy!  But how does it affect your rankings?

Really nicely according to Nate Elliot over at Forrester.  His team ran a test on how sites ranked in the major search engines for 40 of the most popular keyword phrases. The basic finding was that where videos existed in the pool of possibilities for a query, video boosted rankings.  They did some back of the envelope math and came up with the result that each video in the pool has an 11,000 to 1 chance of ranking on the first page, compared with a 500,000 to 1 chance for a basic text page.  Big difference (even if the math is a little wobbly).

The underlying message is that optimized videos are becoming more important — you still need to connect text to your videos in order to get them to display in search results. Elliot offers some basic video optimization tips, which I will not duplicate here since you can read them in his brief post.

I think for most small to medium sized businesses the biggest challenge will be to make the video in the first place.  Yeah, I know that any 8th grader can shoot a video and upload it, but that’s not the same thing as having a video that both promotes your business AND is interesting enough to get some viral distribution.  Plus, you need to have a good way to display it on your site.  It takes a little work — but it sounds like it’s worth it.

Nothing is more central to the onpage SEO than keyword selection and deployment.  I know I harp on this, but the search engines are trying to gauge relevancy, and they still do it mostly the old-fashioned way:  they read text.  What’s on your page is one of the two major sources of information (‘signals’ in insider lingo) the SEs use to rank your page.

A few days ago one of my favorite writers, P.J. Fusco of the ClickZ network, published some keyword analysis research that tested how the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) ranked pages for the keyword ‘fitness equipment’.  I instantly grabbed her table graphic showing results for my afternoon presentation at the Central Coast Wedding Professionals’ monthly meeting because the hows and whys of keywords on pages is so basic to SEO.

PJ Fusco's summary chart for keyword impact on rankings

There’s a lot of information here, but one take away is that the SEO guy who tries to play by fixed ‘rules’ (you need exactly 12 mentions of your keyword!) is wrong.  The variability is much higher than would fit with nice neat rules like that.  That’s not surprising when you realize Google uses in the neighborhood of 200 signals to evaluate a page (according to a number of bloggers — whatever the exact number, it isn’t trivial).

In fact, in a table I do not reproduce here, PJ found that the #1 ranking site for ‘fitness equipment’ on MSN does not use the keyword in the meta description, URL, alternative text, link text, bold or italicized text, or <H1> headers.  What the heck is that about?

Well, there’s inbound links for one thing.  There’s history.  There’s (mostly unknown) behavioral factors.  We do not know what is in those algorithms, no matter how much we test.

Does this mean you can/should ignore the onpage keyword SEO?  Of course not.  Especially if you don’t have tons of great, high quality inbound links, or your site is relatively new, but even if you are doing well in rankings — do what you can to make your site relevant to specific keyword queries that match your content and your offer. The broader message of the research is that 100% of the ranking sites used the keyword phrase in the title tag; the big majority used it in the meta description; and so forth (see the table).

As I always say, it’s not rocket science.  But it does require some research, attention to detail, and followup.  Success is the reward for thoughtful persistence.

Syndicating content you make to other blogs and websites is a good thing, especially if you get inbound links and traffic from it (which is one of your purposes). But it also creates duplicate content issues, forcing the search engines to determine which content source is the original one that deserves the better rank for the content. What is the smart thing to do?

Vanessa Fox started a string on ranking on syndicated content last May. She offers several ideas for how to boost your original content, the most important of which is to include an absolute link back to your original content in anything you syndicate to others.  Yet, Google et al might still consider the syndicated use of the content as a higher ranking because the website or blog it is on is considered more authoritative.  The search engines will still try to eliminate duplicate content, and your original work might be the version that gets eliminated.

A hyperactive version of this problem is when your content gets scraped and re-used on somebody else’s website (a client of mine produces the best event calendar in our county and it is repeatedly “borrowed” by scrapers).  How can we ensure that we get credit for our good work?

I don’t think there’s a 100% solution to this.  However, Google’s Webmaster Blog assures us that they “look at various signals to determine which site is the original one”.  Adding the inbound links to your site will always help, obviously, but beyond that you need to persist in keeping your content clean (limit the duplicate content that is unnecessary) and identify the files you want search engines to see in your Sitemap XML submission.  You do not want to give up the benefits of syndication, and you cannot stop scrapers — you can only make sure your content is fresh, well-formulated technically, and syndicated to people who will play fair with you in giving credit for your content.

In a post from Graywolf, Michael Gray poses the problem: since Google’s published PageRank is unlikely to be a good measure of authority, how do we choose inbound linking partners?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.  Gray gives a great definition of the ideal inbound link, but it doesn’t help to identify it.  The rub is that we do not know, with certainty, what the search engines consider ‘authoritative’.  For my money, the best way to determine this is to see what the actual linking patterns are between potential linking partners or sources.  Blogrolls are one wonderful source of info on this, since the blogs that are on a LOT of blogrolls in a space are probably the opinion leaders you are seeking.  Using a competitive analysis tool like Compete is another way to check out these nodes, by seeing for any given site what other sites are visited by the same people.  Finally, if you are a specialist in a vertical/business segment/locality, your instincts about who looks ‘authoritative’ is worth paying attention to–pretty often they will have the good inbound links you are seeking.  You just cannot ever pretend to KNOW what Mother Google is ‘thinking’.

It happens all the time as I work with clients: do outbound links hurt my rankings?  Here is a nice, brief article about linking strategy by SEO pro Rand Fishkin that tells you why outbound links can be a good thing.  Not that you should go crazy over it….

Or your enemy?  I work with a lot of CMS ’cause my clients work with a lot of developers.  And I have learned to hate some of them (the CMS not the clients or the developers).  I hate systems that insert garbage into the URLs and then don’t allow us to rewrite the garbage into something appealing to search engines and people.   I hate systems that don’t allow us to see the code and manage the code on our own pages.  I hate systems that make it impossible to move a website to any other hosting or CMS environment (and that’s a lot of them).

Ian Lurie recently posted about SEO-ready CMS, and there’s some good points in it if you are looking for a new system (or building a new website).  A system I have enjoyed on several small business sites is the fck editor, which I first learned about from Synthetic Kit.  This is a flexible and intuitive system that does not require any installation on the client computer–it will remind you of working with Word (only fewer crashes).  I’ve also run across it in sites built by Dennis Clevenger over at CleverConcepts, and it seems it can be installed in different versions that offer the feature set you need (but ask Dennis about that).

This is a quickie:  see this diagram for a nice summary of the additional factors you can consider in optimizing a local business website, courtesy of Greg Sterling.  It’s based on the analysis of David Mihm.

Is your 404 page an error?

The 404 page means ‘page not found’ in server-ese.  But you don’t want your visitors to get the brush off with a standard server page that simply announces the page doesn’t exist, and worse, often accuses the visitor of mistyping the URL.  Here in this post from Get Elastic are some fun ideas for 404 pages — one might be right for you!