SEO

Great news for all Webmasters around, Google opens their Web Master Tools doors to the public. Last November, the search giant announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now they’re taking that program and bringing it to the peps!

With access to the Google APIs hosting service provider can now integrate Google Webmaster Tools into your customer’s control panel, so customers can create accounts and submit Sitemaps all without ever leaving your service. From a customers standpoint this is awesome too because it’ll help then understand their traffic and diagnose potential problems by providing insight into how Google crawls and indexes their site.

What if my hoster isn’t offering this yet? No problem. You can still sign up for Web Master Tools the old fashion way simply hop on over to Google click Business Solutions scroll down click on Webmaster Central and then sign in to Webmasters Tools, if you don’t already have an account don’t worry it’s totally free and there’s no obligation.

In addition your account allows you to include as many domains as you want and lets you share info about your web pages directly with Google to help improve the site’s visibility. Similarly you’ll also get up-to-date helpful articles, webmasters guidelines and technical information specifically designed to make your site more search and user friendly.

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Up till now search engines (Google, Yahoo! etc) weren’t ever able to crawl Flash files and when they did end up indexing some it was never completely free from error. So if you wanted to built a website and actually have people find it, then it made sense to do without the Flash. Nonetheless Flash still became very trendy among developers because of its knack for, shall we say, overlooking the obvious and putting together very unusual websites.

Adobe also says it’s “providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently UNDISCOVERABLE by search engines.”

Sweet! Now that Adobe has finally admitted (despite arguments to the contrary) that SWF format has never been properly index by anyone of the search engines (or that its always been pretty much crap) that should finally shut up all you evangelical Flash pushers and feens clamming Flash is the holy grail of the Internet. Shouldn’t?

So has Adobe really done what its says its done? Frankly I’m not sure. Adobe claims that this stuff will provide more relevant search results and rankings for RIA content. And in a separate blog post, Google also seems to affirm that claim stating that they’ve already launched a “Flash indexing algorithm”, which will result in better search results. Well, before you all start heading to Starbucks and buying each other those skinny soy decaf lattes, the real questions is, how much better is this as opposed to plain old static HTML text and what are the confines?

They say that in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, similarly if up till now flash files were not being indexed whatsoever, then the fact that there’s been a little progress may indeed be called “better”, but Flash indexing algorithm or not there’s still a lot of reasons why you should never go for a 100% flash-based website.

Yes Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds etcetera, etcetera, but there’s some limitations. For example, Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. Which means that if your webpage uses JavaScript to load a Flash file. Guess what? They may not be able to discover and index the contents of that file.

Google has also admitted they “can’t attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files.” In other words so if your Flash file loads another file - such as an HTML file, an XML file, or another SWF file – what their saying is that they might index the contents of those files, but they won’t consider that content to be part of the content in your Flash files. That doesn’t sound very impressive, does it? What then? The Flash indexing algorithm does exactly what it sounds like it does NOTHING, other than the rendering of incomplete documents and the dramatic equivalent of inaccessibility.

Generally speaking when designing sites for my clients, I tend to make my content driven Flash applications run off of external XML files that are read at runtime. That way even a novice web developer with no understanding of Flash can have the functionality of editing their website’s content in notepad, and not have to recompile the swf file. Are you seriously suggesting not attaching the contents of those files to the rest of my Flash file? Seriously? Are you kidding? What the f$#@ are you talking about!

Does Adobe really expect us to believe that this will provide more relevant organic search rankings? Listen, I want my Flash files to be indexed just as much as the next guy and while this is a welcomed and important step in the right direction on the part of Adobe there’s still a lot of work to do.

So, if you do decide to use Flash (God help us all), do it in moderation and remember while Google can index the content of Flash files, other search engines wont. On that note, don’t forget to provide text equivalents of these files to help other search engines crawl and index your content.

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I get a lot of little email from nubies wanting to know how to customize a flash template typically the email reads something like this. “I purchased one of your flash website template for a client, I want to customize it with their own details which program should I use? (Dreamweaver, FrontPage, PSD)? Says it is a .swf file?” (Aww bless their little entrepreneurial hearts).

Then there’s the ones from your best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s nephew who duped you into to hire’m to do your company’s website, frantically asking “Help! I know nothing about Flash. How do I change out the pictures and symbols? I have the trial version of flash. I just want to change the prefilled info and pics to my info and pics”.

What do they have in common? Their all trying to learn things they don’t understand. Yes friends, they’re only looking for short cuts and cheat sheets it’s not about comprehension anymore, its all about instant gratification and actually many truly believe that they can cut and paste their way right through the creative process.

In order for us to understand this correctly consider this. If I were to take a thesaurus, cram it down word for word and began using three-syllable words just for the sake of making me sound smart. Would the use of such knowledge actually improve my vocabulary? Uh, most likely no, in fact I’ll probably just go around pissing off other people and quoting things out of context. Just because you can repeat a phrase doesn’t mean you comprehend or that you’re able to relate that information into a meaningful idea of some sort.

Similarly, if you hire an individual who does not take the necessary time to comprehend even the most fundamental of concepts such as layers, masking, frames, libraries and symbols you’ll end up with a site that’s just worthless and unprofessional running the risk of alienating yourself from the support of the search engine (so crucial to the future success of your business) by way of which some have inadvertently deterred many from good search engine optimization practices.

Nonetheless, from my experience I’ve found that clients are demanding more professionalism. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes (can you?), and design skills along with an accurate knowledge of the technology being presented will always mark him/her out from the pack. On that note, I entreat you to invest in professional template customization.

Our template customization services are only $380 a pop, and they include customizing any template, domain name registration, hosting set-up (1st year free web hosting included!), changing the “your Company Name” text, the content text, color scheme, making the contact form work, replacing the template imagery with your own and free website maintenance during 1 month upon project completion.

The result is a unique an interactive website working intuitively to provide a return on your investment. Should you wish to acquire more information about our template customization services simply jump on over to the contact form and let us know.

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Now that we have (haven’t we?) finally buried the myth behind custom web design vs template customization by showing you how every web designer custom or not uses some form of template regardless and that the only real difference is in the tremendous amount of money you’ll pay to have a site custom made, may be we can now move on to search engine optimization and show you how to generate some real traffic over to them pages; after all aesthetics have no real relevance in search.

In this post Dyfed Lloyd Evan gives you some real insight on tuning-up your site’s PR and explains in layman’s terms how all that works and shows you lots of other helpful hints on how to publicize your site.

For the moment, at least, it seems that Google has won the ’search engine wars’. The search behemoth now has over 78% of the search engine market cornered. This means that 78% of all searches performed on the internet are done via Google.

At the heart of Google’s strategy to delivering search results is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank‘. This is named after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and is an attempt at measuring the popularity of a web page based, primarily, on the number and quality of links coming into a site. It is this algorithm that, ultimately, determines your site’s rankings within Google’s search results.

How Does Google Work? Over the years many website owners have tried to claim (some even doing so in court) that Google’s algorithm was somehow ‘unfairly’ keeping them from the top of the search engine results. The truth is that Google, as a private company, is not beholden to the millions of website owners who all want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Rather, Google is beholden to its stock-holders and needs to be seen as delivering value to them.

Google needs to earn profits and the company does this by selling advertising. The company has determined that the best way to deliver value for its advertisers is to have the best and most relevant websites be the ones that are easiest to find on the web. Thus Google’s revenues from advertising are tied to Google’s website ranking systems.

What’s Google’s Real relevance in Search? The question of Google’s real relevance in terms of how much search and other traffic comes to a webstie has been a vexed one. I asked this question of a number of my colleagues. We all have large websites in different domains and we pooled our information for the first 6 months of 2008 to arrive at the following figures…

Total search traffic 54.8% of which:
53.7% Google Search Traffic
40.2% Other main search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Windows Live etc)
6.1% Other search engines (the tiny ones)

The remaining 45.2% of our traffic all came from link sources: articles, blogs, recommendations, forum posts and links from people referring our websites.

So, only just over half the web traffic comes from the search engines and almost half comes from other links! However, the good news is that the way to garner more search engine traffic and more general ‘link referral’ traffic is one and the same!

How to Rank Well As was mentioned above, Google’s ranking system works with both the number and quality of in-bound links. One of the best ways of getting these links is to write and submit articles. Many article directories have excellent page rank and lots of site visitors. This means that submitting articles and including your URLs in them are a great way of gaining more links to your site. But they’re also a wonderful, direct, way of getting traffic to your site (remember the traffic figures above).

There are, however, a few key SEO considerations to take into account when writing your articles.

Article Links and SEO One big advantage of writing articles is that you can define your own ‘anchor text‘. This is the text in the link that defines what the person looking at the link sees. It also gives the search engine spider following the link an indication of what the page it’s navigating to is all about. This is why you should never, ever, put something like ‘click here’ in your links!

You link text should be related to the subject of the page you’re linking to, as this makes it more relevant to the search engines. Now, if at all possible the text of your links should also match the key words you are targeting on your web pages as these give the keywords more relevance and will improve your rankings for them.

Also, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that term. Indeed, if you are just starting and a keyword is very competitive (’computer’, for example) then you may never, realistically, be able to rank for it. But if you target a keyword like ‘extreme computer construction’ you are far more likely to be ranked for that term. Be clever and don’t try and bite off more than you can chew.

Indeed, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that keyword. In this case it may well take you many weeks before you will notice any effects from your article writing efforts.

But for less competitive keywords you may notice a jump of several tens of positions in your rankings with as few as 3 articles. In this case, you get out what you are willing to put in.

One thing to note is that Google takes not of all the link text that comes through to your page. If you have more than 60% of the links with exactly the same text this marks-up a red flag an your rankings may well drop. As a result you should vary the link text and you also need to alter the text surrounding the links.

Given enough time and commitment you can use article marketing to elevate any single web page on your website into multiple top spots in Google’s SERP rankings. However, this does mean that you need to write and publish articles on a daily basis. Few people have that level of commitment to their websites.

About the Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Directory where you can freely submit high quality articles. If you really want high quality back-links to your sight then you need to check out his free eCourse on How to Maximize your Web Traffic.

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