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There is no industry consensus regarding the use of Flash on a web site when it comes to the issue of SEO. The general problem with Flash is that the search engines don’t see the text embedded within those files so they can not rank these files. But Flash has can produce beautifully and highly usable websites.

So the designer, SEO, and site owner have to work together to deal with this issue IF it’s important to “solve” this issue. Here are the major of choices one is faced with. However what technical solution you should use will have a lot to do with the present design of the site.

The big question is the site 100 percent Flash or does it have Flash as an insertion within an HTML file(s). It’s the 100 percent flash file that represents the bigger challenge. Here are some of the major approaching to dealing with SEO for Flash enabled sites.

Redesign complete in HTML. Some designers feel that a complete redesign is required. They feel that Flash is a complete disaster and should not be used at all. These designers point to a number of issues:

• In Bound Links are a problem because you have to decide where to send them; the HTML alternative page or the Flash page.
• If you don’t redo your pages you can only add a limited amount of keyword rich text to the metadata like the title and description tags.

Here is this is a link presenting this perspective:

http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Tips_And_Techniques/Flash_SE-Ashley_P-1360/index.php

On the other end of the scale are those that advocate the use of the MacroMedia Flash SDK. Using the Flash SDK you can see if how the search engines will see you files. Macromedia developed this SDK because it realized the search engines weren’t reading their .SWF formats. They offer the SDK to the Search Engines to encourage them to be able to index .SWF files. Here are some details about the limit of this approach:

• Flash search won’t read traced text or text that has been broken apart, so don’t make the letters a shape even if you’re temped do this is for letter spacing, which designers tend to do for critical text titles.
• It will also ignore dynamically loaded text. Be it from external files or dynamically generate from the myText.text function.
• HtmlText — any URLs assigned using this function will be pulled while the rest of the content will not.
• It should be remembered that each Search Engine may be using the SDK or do their own implementation, so mileage with vary.

Here is an article that talks about taking this approach:

http://www.straightupsearch.com/archives/2006/02/flash_and_seo_s.html

IP Cloaking – This method of serving up different content for the search engines spiders vs. end-users has long been considered a black hat, unethical, SEO tactic. This is accomplished by keeping a current list of the IP signatures of all the known spiders on the web and comparing it to the IP header information as HTTP requests are received. If the IP is on the list then the text version is sent to the spider. If the IP isn’t on the list then the Flash page is sent.

• There are legitimate uses of cloaking. For example the New York Times uses IP Cloaking to send full content to the spiders so it can be indexed. The regular reader doesn’t have access to The Times achieves because they have to purchase individual articles or subscribe to the service.
• If the content of the Flash and HTML versions of the pages then the use of IP Cloaking wouldn’t necessary be considered a misuse. However, in the past IP cloaking has been used as a bait-and-switch technique so it has a bad reputation with the SEs.

Another approach is to use the free Javascript script called SWFObject() which detects when browsers has the Flash Plug-In. If SWFObject detects that the Flash Plug-In is present then the code assumes that this is a real browser and serves up the Flash version of the file. Since most search engine can’t deal with Flash, they’ll only see the primary content. This content is regular HTML content; like links, text, headers, images, etc. coding that is normally added to an ordinary HTML page. It is this part of the file that is edited and styled to be SEO friendly.

A good reference for SWFObject can be found here:

http://www.jehochman.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml

Not everything has to be a technical solution. The site may have been designed with a high income audience in mind right from the start. So the “solution” may have nothing to do with ranking well in the organic listings. Do a PPC campaign instead of trying to build organic traffic may be a better approach.

None of these methods address the problem that you have to do the site twice, one for Flash and another for the HTML version. So if you do any of this after the fact you will undoubtedly have created more work for yourself.

For those still questioning the acquisition of YouTube by Google several months ago, I offer this rationale: Gmail Theater.

With an extremely low budget, paper clips and office supplies-style of puppetry, YouTube viewers are subjected to a four act play of sorts, explaining four benefits of using Gmail.

Entertaining: yes. But it sparks may debates regarding targeted marketing, and social media outlets harboring commercials and advertisers. Everywhere you go on the web, no matter how ‘free’ the viral video clip may be, chances are you will have to watch a 15-30 second commercial first. The cutesy, lo-fi approach from this Google YouTube collaboration totals over four minutes! We would never tolerate that length of time on TV (not even during the much coveted Super Bowl ads) so why is this type of targeted marketing acceptable on the web?

In the world of online marketing and SEO/SEM, this is marketing genius. In the real world of ‘I watch YouTube for cool virals, not commercials’, it’s like clicking on an innocent looking link and being redirected to a porn site. If that’s your thing (!), it wont bother you and you’ll find it entertaining. If it’s not, and it happens often enough, you may take the term ‘going postal’ to a new level not seen since Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

As the internet grows exponentially, the greedy advertisers and seedy SEM link ninjas (yours truly especially) look for new ways to target traffic and give more exposure to our clients. It’s inevitable that the next new thing will be harped on and exploited by all kinds for all purposes. Google paid $1.65 billion for this kind of exposure. Thankfully, we don’t charge as much!

The last thing I want to do, as I’m sure it’s the last thing any reader wants, is to review the year. It seems required of just about everybody who’s a regular media contributor.

But one aspect of the year has prompted me to override my own reluctance, since it’s brought up by factual reporting (though we’ll come to how fully factual it might be, later) not by opinionated reviewing.

We all know that online searching has become the key to how we consume our media now – even though the time-honored notion of simply (did I hear “idyllically”) surfing the web has not exactly gone away, no matter how antiquated it sounds. So just what, exactly, did we all search for in 2006?

The answers are revealing – and, depending on your point of view, either depressing or very depressing.

The biggest and most trend-capturing search engine is of course Google. And worldwide, what has been searched for through Google can be read in the form of a top-ten table. Number One is – guess what – a website, and a social-networking site at that. It’s Bebo, the fast-rising people-connector whose relative distinctiveness derives from its emphasis on music and musical bands in particular -in the way that YouTube functions through video – and which began in the UK, but in so far as any such entity has a physical geographical home, now boasts San Francisco as a base.

The full top ten list thrown up by Google is:

1 – Bebo

2 – MySpace

3 – World Cup

4 – Metacafe

5 – Radioblog

6 – Wikipedia

7 – Video

8 – Rebelde

9 – Mininova

10 – Wiki

The kicker to this reporting, however, is that Google is recommended by informed observers to be including in the numbers that kick Bebo to the top all sorts of inconsistencies, like the repeated misspellings of Bebo that all get aggregated together. Would that be enough to statistically alter the real rankings? Hmmm…. in later discussion, maybe, we should take note that what appear to be simple facts from Google will often need deeper investigation and interpretation.

Meanwhile the number two search engine, Yahoo, definitely appears to have developed a clear character of its own in 2006. If you hold up to the light its top ten searches, you’ll see that Yahoo has become the engine of choice for our celebrity culture. (Is that because, I wonder, it took its chief executive, Terry Semel, from the world of entertainment, in fact out of a 24 year career in the Hollywood dream factory of Warner Bros. Yahoo’s top ten searches look, like it or not, like this:

1 – Britney Spears

2 – WWE

3 – Shakira

4 – Jessica Simpson

5 – Paris Hilton

6 – American Idol

7 – Beyonce Knowles

8 – Chris Brown

9 – Pamela Anderson

10 – Lindsay Lohan

Now, you may think this is kind of sad, or very sad? But what if like me you’re British? Yahoo’s searches can be rather easily compared country by country. And this below – I tremble to acknowledge – is what the British users of Yahoo.co.uk have been mostly looking for on the Internet in 2006:

1 – Heather Mills McCartney

2 – Pete Burns

3 – Big Brother

4 – The Ordinary Boys

5 – World Cup

6 – Steve Irwin

7 – Borat

8 – Notting Hill Carnival

9 – Zidane

10 – Kate Moss

It makes any self-respecting Brit want to trade-in that nice navy-blue Her Britannic Majesty’s passport.

I could go on, and look at the way the lately re-christened third search engine, Live (formerly known as MSN Search) provides us with a obsession-measure that’s a bit more widely internationally-minded but still as celebrity-ridden, in that as well as Shakira of the magical hips it includes Ronaldinho of the magical soccer toes – but I won’t.

I’ll just wish everyone a happier and more rewarding New Year of searching.

The three major search engines have endorsed a new XML based standard for sitemaps under a new organization, www.sitemaps.org. This is great news for the search industry and shows that the three major search engines can work together to the benefit of the whole industry.

If you have been involved with SEO for the last couple of years you know that making a sitemap part of your site is an accepted SEO method to make sure the search engines spiders find all the pages on your site. The next step the search engines took was to provide a format, again in XML, that you create and give the search engines access to; you can find information about Google’s sitemap in their Webmaster Help Center.

Using the Sitemaps.org protocol doesn’t guarantee that web pages will be included in search engines, however it will give the web crawlers a better chance of finding more of your pages. You can also be sure to see the software vendors of sitemap generators quickly add support for this new format. If you have an active Ecommerce site the format may also prove to be a good way to help the search engines keep up with product line changes.

My, my … the ups and downs that giants may have to endure when they buy a smaller entity.

If you ever wanted to feel sorry for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, owners of Google, be prepared to feel so now. They hare finding life after buying youTube for $1.65 billion a lot more difficult than they expected, and certainly more so than they are publicy admitting now. The search engine goliath has gone to CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp. and others offering tens of millions of dollars in upfront money for the right to broadcast their video content legally on YouTube.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt maintains, with great professional calm, that:

“so far people like [our] message; they are now trying to figure out what to do about it – should they, should they not, under what terms, and those sort of things.”

The fact is, though, that Google needs to agree terms with these particular “people”, as desperately as a fish needs water – or else its expensive video-carrying acquisition will turn out to be as attractive a piece of property as Napster after it was crushed by Big Music litigation.

Traditional Big Media companies are feeling their position of power here. But they’re also being canny – YouTube’s size and loyal user base still strikes them as awesome, and a bit frightening. The industry is reeling over the impact of just one piece of video in particular posted on YouTube. It’s just an ad, designed as such, by ad agency Ogilvy and Mather’s Toronto shop for Unilever’s Dove soap product, but it’s taken off virally with all the energy of a runaway train (or an influenza epidemic, if you object to mixed metaphors).

The 75-second video is pure fantasy, showing a young woman “evolving” – but VERY fast, – into a gorgeous supermodel after using Dove – and it has driven so much traffic to Dove’s site CampaignforRealBeauty.com, that the traffic measurement firm Alexa.com assesses it as three times more effective than the expensive television ad for Dove that aired during last year’s Super Bowl last year,

So YouTube repeatedly demonstrates its reach, but content-providers feel they remain king, and one executive has described to the Financial Times the blackmail-type weapons they are prepared to use, saying:

“The fact is that in three to six months every media company’s going to decide that their stuff gets taken down or that they get paid for it.” It’s like “a big chessboard,” he added.

Oh, the ups and downs, steps forward and back in this kind of e-deal. They’re maybe proving too much for some. Buyers’ remorse sounds like it has set in at NBC Universal, who made a similar acquisition, though not quite as massive as googles’, In march this year they bought iVillage, the women’s networking site pioneered by the doyenne of New York’s Silicone Alley, Candice Carpenter. They paid the then big-sounding number, $600 million – this after having put money into iVillage once before and then withdrawing. This time around they are wondering all over again if it’s worth it.

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of NBC’s owners, candidly told employees earlier this week:

“You know, we probably overpaid for iVillage,”

I can be a bit glib, and even flip, sometimes. I admit it.

My confessional mode is brought on by Microsoft’s ad campaign starting today (Friday Oct 27, 2006) trying once again to boost their search engine capacity. And what I have to confess is that in a recent article. I dismissively referred to MSN Search as appearing really low on the totem pole of engines, especially when it comes to directing traffic toward internet shopping sites. My fine editors here at E-Commerce Partners rightly answered my own cheap rhetorical question “does anyone remember MSN as a search engine? – at all?” with a resounding “Yes. We do”.

The editors expanded by saying:

“Since we are partly a search marketing company we are well aware that MSN is part of the big 3 of search, though a very small part”

Quite right. And now Microsoft is trying hard to increase that “very small part” at the expense of the other big Two, Google and Yahoo.

Its ad, created by the advertising agency McCann WorldGroup, is promoting Windows Live, which formally launched in September and is intended to eventually replace MSN Search — itself less than two years old — as Microsoft’s flagship in the search business.

They have a ways to go. Despite a massive, expensive campaign last year – said at the time to be the company’s biggest media-buying effort since the launch of the MSN “Butterfly” branding in 2000 – MSN Search just hasn’t been able to gain any real traction with consumers. Last month, Microsoft sites garnered 11.9% of searches — down from 15.6% the year before, according to the digital ratings-measurement company comScore. Google, meanwhile, was satisfyingly growing its market share to 45.1% last month — up from 37.6% one year ago.

Microsoft and McCann have decided to place the ad, in full-page form, in influential opinion-shaping print venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Jose Mercury News.

They take pains to emphasize features like Windows Live’s image search, local search, and mapping tools. Frankly, these don’t add up to too innovative a package to me.

But the confessional mode is what caught my eye most – and prompted my wanting to report on it. The ad says openly:

“Before we begin, let us state the obvious. We’re late to the game. We admit it. But instead of shrugging our shoulders and becoming a footnote in search history, we’ve decided to write a few new chapters.”

I guess it could work. Avis car-rental has made a fairly successful fetish out of being No 2. Can Bill Gates win out by admitting to being No 3?

While performing SEO keyword analysis for a report, I noticed that when googling some of the targeted keywords, the results showed ‘Refine Results’ links. This happened for any searches containing the word ‘pain‘, in my case ‘back pain‘ and ‘pain patch‘. And so began the questions… If there is a difference between the results in the initial search, and the results contained in these links, how do we get the client to rank if you click on these links?

Is there a difference if you search for ‘back pain treatment’…

…than if you search for ‘back pain’ and then click the ‘Treatment’ link?

Looks like there is… but what is causing the difference in search results?

It turns out the answer lies in the Google Co-Op. Initiated in May 2006, the co-op is a place where you can list yourself as an authority in your field and rank under that specific heading so someone searching for specific information can find it easier than in a broad search. Those ‘Refine Results’ links are actually ‘labels’ that you create and assign to your webpage via XML tags and/or RSS feeds. Note in the screenshot above, in the search results listed under the url it says ‘Labeled Treatment’; and in this case, that url is also labeled for ‘Symptoms’ and ‘For patients’. These ‘labels’ also allow users with Google accounts to subscribe to you. So if they are logged in and search for a topic that is related to yours, you will rank at the top of their results as a ‘Subscribed Link’. The ultimate goal is to eventually gain the trust of Google and the co-op subscribers, which will allow you to affect your search rankings.

This can help a great deal in terms of SEO for keywords and terms that otherwise would be extremely difficult to rank highly for. For example, there is a HUGE difference between the number of results for ‘back pain treatment’…

…and the results for ‘back pain’, then the ‘Treatment’ link.

By adding the ‘Treatment’ label as opposed to just targeting ‘back pain treatment’, the number of pages (competitors) drops from 2,970,000 to 969! And these results show for anyone using Google whether or not they are logged into an account. The use of these labels combined with having users subscribe to you in the co-op and becoming trusted will only improve your ranking amongst the competition.

Google’s extraordinarily costly acquisition of YouTube.com has disturbed many communications industry observers.

“Just a vast collection of three-minute-and-under amateur videos”

was how the expensive purchase was decried to me by one professional cynic

The not-quite-one-year-old site’s video-sharing platform is undoubtedly impressive. It’s clean, fast and easy to use, just like its new parent’s search engine. But is it worth $1.65 billion? Merrill Lynch, who we might expect to know the value of everything, have estimated that Google wouldn’t have paid more than $100 million for the technology alone. It’s the vast audience, about 34 million, that Google was clearly coughing up for.

To many, Rupert Murdoch’s News International seemed profligate when last year it paid $580 million (now a rather paltry sum, don’t you think?) for MySpace.com. I recall an oddly slow-witted British reporter asking Murdoch how he possibly intended to make money out of a web venue where young people simply hung out virtually and shared their interests. There was a memorable pause before the down-to-earth magnate said simply: “Selling advertising”. (emphasis added by Admin)

So look out for Google placing 15- and 30-second pre-roll commercials onto those otherwise commercially innocent videos at YouTube. And for the largely youthful audience deciding whether it’s riled or entertained by this intrusion.

But meanwhile, another dimension to YouTube, less appealing than its vast user-base, continues to stimulate skepticism. “Remember Napster” is the negative cry being heard. That turn-of the-century music-sharing site was of course beaten into retreat – only to be copied later by the corporate music giants, in an insincere, and naturally fee-charging, form of flattery). And the beating came in the shape of aggressive copyright suits.

Now Google is being similarly threatened, and by no less a figure than the gargantuan Time Warner’s boss, Dick Parsons. He told the British newspaper The Guardian that his group of traditional media companies would pursue its copyright complaints against the video- sharing that YouTube practices.

The Google acquisition has not altered TW’s stance, previously expressed to You Tube before the purchase, according to Mr Parsons.

“We were going to pursue it anyway,” he said. “If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along.”

But Parsons expressed a rather more moderate tone than we heard last month from Doug Morris, the chief executive of Universal Music, who attacked YouTube (and also MySpace) as “copyright infringers” during an investors’ conference. Time Warner’s man said:

“We’d like to have our content displayed on these platforms, but on a basis that it respects our rights as the owner of that content.”

Incidentally, Warner Music, which is no longer part of Time Warner, agreed to make its music video library available to YouTube this month in one of the site’s earliest commercial agreements. The deal was followed by agreements with Sony BMG and CBS television.

And all the while, naturally enough, YouTube founder Chad Hurley is seeking to downplay people’s copyright fears.

“We’re committed to developing tools to identify the content and monetize it so they [that is, content owners] can have a new outlet for their content.”

If you’re looking for more proof that success on the web is directly related to content, look no further than the just released report Google in talks to buy YouTube.

In our Media Beat section, DT references YouTube and other user added content based sites (myspace, etc) quite often. Why does he talk about these sites so much? Because the column is called “The Media Beat” and this is where the beat will march us on. It can’t get any more evident than the 1.6 BILLION dollar price tag YouTube is getting slapped with.

Let me repeat the figure… 1.6 Billion dollars. What exactly is worth 1.6 billion? Well, user generated content is a major player in the future of advertising. And any store/site/spot that drives 40+ million people to come around the check things is going to be worth its weight in gold (that’s a lot of eyeballs). And the real brilliance in YouTube is not just the craze (original video) that has rapidly grown… but how that craze was grown. YouTube took advantage of the simple fact that people out there want their own content to be seen and heard. And deservedly so because some of those videos are flat out brilliant. Does YouTube sit in their offices trying to come up with crazy video ideas themselves? No, they do not. Instead they allow their crazy users to come up with content, post it, share it and spread it themselves. The more viral it gets the higher YouTube grows in user numbers which in turn increases their value.

Google is very aware of this phenomenon, having cashed in our their own search phenonmenon years ago. And it looks now that they are going straight for the jugular to capitalize on it.

So how does this fit in with us regular joes out there trying to build a website with the intention of monetization? Simple… regardless of the niche you’re in, it’s still all about the content. What have you been doing lately to increase the value of the content on your website? Do you allow your site visitors and customers to participate? Are you adding something useful for your visitors on a weekly, or even better, daily basis? Chances are the answer is no. Most content additions to ecommerce sites are by way of products and categories. Now don’t get me wrong, adding products and categories is great as long as there is value in those products and categories… but that is not the type of content I’m talking about here. Users EXPECT those products and categories… they also expect competitive prices, high quality customer service, etc… So simply following that method to add value to your site will do nothing more than keep a site as it should be.

The real value comes in the form of well thought out content additions that appeal to your customer base and become so noteworthy that people online ‘have to see it’. Just like that YouTube video of the squirrel water-skiing that became so popular a few years ago. Millions of people had to see it… Now, I understand your market is probably not as broad as the market of people who like to see funny things, but you’ve still got a market and you still need to speak to it in a manner that is not entirely self-serving (meaning: making sales).

I was interested to read a post from Rand at SEOmoz last week where he lays out time spent per SEO client and where his efforts lie (entitled: “Time Distribution for Effective Online Marketing“). It was no suprise to me that Rand spends 40% of his alloted SEO budget per client developing this type of content.

40% is a large part of the overall budget and the the investment is certainly a risky one (if the created content fails to draw visitors). But Rand is able to do this because he has a knack for developing must see stuff that speaks to a known group of active online participants. The problem with that is, most of us in the ecommerce world do not sell to the most tech savvy group of people out there which generally means they are not active participants in the commenting, user added value department. Regardless, that should not stop us. We still see many examples out there of how users can and will add content to a site which adds value, as well as site additions that are so useful people have to use them. An example that sticks out most in my mind that accomplishes both are the reviews at Amazon.com. I can not remember a time I purchased something at Amazon without spending at least 30 minutes reading user reviews. All Amazon did was provide a feedback form for customers and now they’ve got tons of user generated content that helps to MAKE MORE SALES. What’s better than that?

So if a piece or pieces of content can be created that have an impact on your users or an addition to your site can be made that encourages easy user participation, then it would certainly be considered time well spent, if done properly. The problem is most people in the ecommerce world do not even consider such a strategy as worthwhile and the few who do simply put up a blog and add content that is regurgitated throughout the internet. There is no value added there and the efforts seem to be drivin only by “I heard adding a blog to my site would help us in the search engines” and various other poorly thought out reasons.

So, what can you do to add value to your site, encourage your community to participate and build something truely value added and mutually beneficial?

An answer to that question along with an effective implementation plan might be one of the best investments you’ve ever made.

It’s pessimistic enough for Yahoo! that Chief Executive Terry Semel had to disclose to a recent Goldman Sachs conference that his company’s advertising revenue was tapering off compared with expectations. But now, just as gloomily, has come some previously unheard-of news – unheard of across only 11 years of the portal’s existence, admittedly – that Yahoo will be shutting down its US offices over the Christmas holidays. Most of the 10,500 staff will have to use up their vacations to get paid time-off.

What lies behind Yahoo’s new cost-cutting cautiousness is a trend that’s getting more evident by the day in the internet’s financial life.

Closely-focused search advertising is making ever-increasing inroads against the older and still more familiar-looking, generic, display advertising.

Inevitably (since its big rival, Google now rules the roost so unbeatably in internet searching) Yahoo gets to suffer. A new survey from the originally Australian, now New York-based web commerce analysts Hitwise shows that ads on Google send visitors to internet shopping sites at three times the rate that Yahoo achieves – that is at 4.69% of the shopping sites sector’s traffic, compared with Google’s share, which is 14.93%

Near the bottom of the pile, incidentally, is Microsoft’s MSN (- Do you remember MSN as a search engine? At all? -)*. MSN manages to influence only about half the number of shoppers that Yahoo does.

Indeed, very significantly, MSN’s placing (at 2.33%) is below the leader in an important rising category to watch. That category is of course that of social networking sites, and in the lead here for directing visitors to sites where they can shop is, unsurprisingly … MySpace.com. Although still rather new on the scene, MySpace sends to shopping sites approximately 2.5% of their visitors, almost double the proportion it was sending only six months ago. It is sending people to, in descending order of frequency, eBay, Amazon, Gateway, Walmart and Craigslist..

This all fits with the picture of MySpace as a web-marketing resource of rampaging growth. Hitwise calculates the overall market share of visits to MySpace has increased by a remarkable 67% in those same six months.

Oh – and away from numbers, but maybe still indicating some significant market expansion – guess who’s now got herself a MySpace page? None other than Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton

*admin note – yes we do.  since we are partly a search marketing company we are well aware that MSN is part of the big 3 of search, though a very small part)

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