On May 12, Google introduced a new feature called ‘Rich Snippets‘ that will become a standard part of their indexing algorithm. This feature could be important for any business, but I think local businesses should be especially alert to it — it is one more tactic to use in the local search SEO campaign.  Pay attention to this one, folks – it could have a big impact on search over time.

The Rich Snippets feature is an evolving effort to use structured data in search results. Ordinarily, Google picks up a piece of text, usually the meta description, to insert a brief descriptive ‘snippet’ about a website along with the URL in search results. Beginning now, it will sometimes include structured data in the search result snippet in place of the text description.  Google is currently supporting structured data about ratings and people, but plans to begin using other kinds of data soon.

Here’s one example from Google how a rich snippet might look.  In this one, a local business with a rating on Yelp is shown in search results with rating information.

Google has tested this concept and offers an important clue to the importance they give it: It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. That’s the important thing for your business — attracting the click.

It’s not yet clear, to me at least, how individual local businesses will use this feature, but I am sure the issue will be all over the blogosphere for the next few weeks, and we’ll know a lot more soon.  The structured data does have to be tagged by someone who knows what they are doing (your webmaster, unless you build websites yourself), but as always Google is providing examples like the ones you see in the link above.

One last thing:  You might be asking, what is structured data?  Roughly, it is information that is defined by a variable that can take a range of values.  “First name” = “Glenn” in my case.  Ratings information is classic, since there is a structure that includes the name of the business, a ratings system (e.g., 1 to 4 stars), a price range, and might include a testimonial in text.  If you run a business that can be rated, in Yelp or TripAdvisor for example, it is described by structured data.

One more part of your SEO package.  Do use it.

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.

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.