Accession Media

The folks at Google announced yesterday that their latest algorithm release will now be able to crawl and index text-based content that is inside Flash files. I love their wording…

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines.

…understatement of the year! So now all the designers will be jumping for joy since they will have a comeback to the old SEO speech they’ve been getting for years. While we’ve always sustained that Flash and SEO efforts can be harmonious, this news certainly takes it to a whole new level.

So I hear you asking - “doesn’t this put the SEO’s (YOU Josh!) out of a job?” Not hardly. It basically makes our lives a bit easier in that we can focus our SEO conversations on important stuff like content and links, and perhaps set aside the whole Flash vs. HTML religious war. Hallelujah!

However, one important point to remember…

At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

The old best practices around having well-written, keyword-rich text information on your site still apply folks. Only now the text can sing and dance too!

The big news this week of course is that Microsoft has unveiled a bid to buy Yahoo! for $31 per share in cash and stock. That equates to a $44.6 billion offer. As most industry analysts and pundits quickly realized, this is basically Microsoft’s latest attempt to try and stack up in the search market vs. Google.

Microsoft has tried repeatedly to build, rebuild and optimize the various incarnations of their own search engine product and its associated pay per click market tools. To date, in my opinion, they haven’t come close to being successful and remain the third tier player after Google and Yahoo! in the lucrative paid search engine advertising market. So it makes a lot of sense that they would buy the number two player to combine forces and get a bigger piece of the market.

However, beyond just search, Yahoo! also has massively trafficked and advertised upon content properties like Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. So they bring more to Microsoft’s table than just search, they are also a major competitor to the MSN content network.

But, in my mind the underlying theme in this potential transaction is that Microsoft seems to be saying “I give up” in trying to compete with Google on its own. By buying Yahoo! they can get a jump start in the right direction and get away from the “software company” stigma. As Google continues to build out web-based (and FREE) tools and applications for the enterprise (which we use here at Accession Media and love), Microsoft needs to remain relevant in this reshaped market - buying Yahoo! could be a big help.

Of course, since this announcement the big question to Google has been “are you scared?” I’ve seen at least two interviews with high ranking Google execs where they were polite - but you could tell they were holding back laughter. My feeling is that, if Microsoft does pull off this purchase, and THEN manages not to totally screw up Yahoo!, the combined entity will still just be second best in the paid search market. A little closer to Google, granted, but still second best.

Oh my…I think the SEM/SEO industry may have gone too far…we have our own “awards show.” In the spirit of the Emmy Awards…we have the Semmy’s. I guess it’s kind of cool to be part of an industry that is so enthusiastic about what it does that is has its own “awards” for thought-leading blog postings in the space. However, Matt couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Dundies” episode of The Office.

For those of you that know that I just moved into a new house, and that Accession Media moved into a new office-this posting isn’t about either of those. Though some more planning on our house move would have saved a ton of aggravation…

No, this posting is about moving your website - or rather, redesigning it. If you have an existing website that you are planning on rebuilding or redesigning, make sure you consider what your regular sources of traffic are. Especially if your site is larger (10’s to hundreds of pages) and depends on advertising revenue! Ask yourself these questions as you prepare to launch a new version of your website:

1. Is one of your major sources of traffic the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc)? What percentage of your monthly traffic comes from these sources? (Hint: check your web analytics referring traffic or acquisition reports to find out.)
2. When you launch the new version of the website, will the URLs of some or all of your sites pages change? Meaning will this http://www.yoursite.com/olddirectory/oldpage.html change to http://www.yoursite.com/newdirectory/newpage.aspx?

If the answer to #2 is “yes” and the answer to #1 is “a lot” or “about 40-50%” then you need to be sure to take a few steps to mitigate a looming problem after you launch your shiny new website.

What problem you ask?

The old assumption was that a new website launch would increase traffic. The shear beauty and usability off the revised site would inspire more visitors to stay longer. The press releases around the rebuild would drive far more traffic than was already coming on a daily basis. However, this was before the skyrocketing use of search engines in the past 7 or 8 years (I’m looking at you Google).

In that time search engines went from being a novelty that didn’t work so well to being the place to start your online session when you are looking for anything from new pressure gauges, to info on Multiple Sclerosis, to a local Indian restaurant, to a new car. This was in no small part due to the rise in the amount of content on the web, and the ever increasing ability and efficiency of the big search engines to index it all and present users with relevant results for their queries.

So where does this leave us today? Most websites (especially ones that have been around for a few years) that don’t have registration or for-pay login functionality will find that traffic from the search engines make up a big portion of their monthly traffic - usually anywhere from 40-80%! Once you launch that pretty new website you have officially broken all of the links that Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others have in their indices. When users perform relevant searches and your old pages come up, people will click on them and most likely get a 404 (”Page Not Found”) error. In short order the old pages will fall out of the index, but it may take a while for the new pages to get indexed and rank as well as your old ones did. The result can often be a significant dip in traffic post-launch.

So what can be done to mitigate this? Three critical things:

1. Make sure you look at your stats and see which pages are bringing in traffic from the search engines. Make a list of those URLs - say the top 100 - then 301 redirect (301 is important!) those old pages to the URL of the same or similar pages on the new site.
2. Look at backlinks in the search engines. Which of your site pages have attracted lots of links from other sites online? Make sure those pages are also 301 redirected to appropriate new site pages if they weren’t caught in step 1. Then attempt to contact the webmasters of the sites that link to your pages and get them to update their links. This can be arduous, but depending on the value of those incoming links may just be worth the work.
3. Make sure your new site’s 404 page is friendly and helpful. There will probably still be pages of your old site that weren’t caught in steps 1 and 2 above, and 404 pages are a fact of life online. However, if you make sure your 404 error page offers users options, you can help keep that traffic on the site. Example: “The page you are looking for couldn’t be found - use our search box above or click here to go to our site’s home page.” This is a basic example, but you can take this even further with 404 page functionality that senses the referring keyword of users hitting that page from search engines, etc. (You may find this book helpful in this area)

While these three techniques seem like basic, common sense “webmastering,” I’m constantly seeing many site owners forget about these basics in the flurry of activity that leads up to a new site launch deadline. These items are often left at the bottom of the project plan as a “nice to have,” but if not addressed before the launch can come back to bite you.

While there are no guarantees that these mitigation techniques will get your new pages ranking well very quickly (this is still going to depend on the other traditional SEO factors), they will help stave off a big post-launch traffic dip for sites that owe much of their traffic to the major search engines.

If you have any questions about this posting, or would like help analyzing your site traffic in preparation for a new site launch, we are always happy to help.

We were asked by a potential client the other day - “I know there are a billion factors that go into ranking well in search engines, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?”

Without pause the answer was: “it has to be backlinks.”

High quality, regularly updated content has the most influence in search engine rankings - but what is the measure of high quality content in eyes of Googlebot? Backlinks, a.k.a. inbound links. These “votes” for the quality of your site from other site owners are the most important key to increasing your natural rankings in search engines.

Put simply, backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Search engines consider many factors when analyzing your inbound links. Google and other search engines will analyze the number of inbound links your website has, and also the “quality” of the sites that those links come from, and use this as an indication of how it should treat your pages in the listings. The name of the game is to get as many quality inbound links as you can. The site linking to yours has to be relevant to the keywords and subject matter of your website.

How does your site currently stack up in the inbound linking department? To find the number of links you have to your site, you can go to Google or Yahoo! and do a search for “link:www.yoursite.com”. Click here to see an example of this for our favorite auto racing site. This will bring up a list of sites that link to yours. Google and Yahoo both have tools that show the quantity of inbound links and which pages on your site have the most links. If you want to get really deep we highly recommend Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Building your site’s portfolio of quality inbound links can be tough…perhaps we can help!

I had an interesting conversation with a potential client the other day. They were looking for some help with search engine optimization or SEO as we like to call it.

SEO is the component of search engine marketing that aims to get your website pages highly ranked (on the first page of results preferably, at the top of the list even more preferably) in the natural search results…not the sponsored results where you buy your spot. A company purporting to help you rise in the natural search results of the major search engines is often referred to as an SEO firm, or just an SEO. Sponsored search is called pay-per-click marketing, and a very different discipline, which I can address in a later posting.

Anyway, this potential client I was chatting with was interested in knowing about us and what we can do for them, but midway through the conversation he stopped me and sort of broke the ice by asking me (and I’m paraphrasing here) “how do I know if some of the SEO companies I’m interviewing are for real? They all guarantee different things. They all say they can deliver the world for a large monthly retainer. How can I tell who is legitimate and who is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge?”

This excellent question changed the tone of the conversation a great deal because I went from being a guy trying to sell my services, to someone trying to counsel a fellow business person through a scary territory in which I have a good bit of exposure, which is generally how I would rather approach things. Then today I happened across this excellent posting by SEO guru Jill Whalen on ISEdb.com that basically answers this same question in the same way I answered it for my potential client. I highly recommend reading Jill’s posting before starting out on an evaluation of SEO firms.

If after reading my rambling you don’t have time to read Jill’s posting, they just know this one thing: the absolute favorite scammy SEO sales pitch, one that a cold-calling SEO sales person actually tried to tell me once, is that their firm can guarantee you top placement (or any placement) in Google’s (or any other large search engine’s) natural rankings. This is an absolute lie. If you read Google’s advice for choosing an SEO firm you will see this spelled out plainly!

Bottom line - be careful and do your homework. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

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UPDATE: here’s another article with great advice on this same topic

Does your website have a sitemap? A sitemap is a page on your site that lists all the other pages on the site, usually in a tree structure so that a user can easily navigate to any part of the site without rooting around through navigation (here is our sitemap). Aside from the usability service that a sitemap offers your site’s human visitors, it also makes a nice place for search engine spiders to go and quickly understand the layout of a website and index all its pages in a fast and effective manner. It wasn’t long before Google realized this and embraced an XML format version of the classic sitemap as a tool for webmasters to help the Googlebot crawl their site in an orderly fashion. They launched Google Sitemaps (here is our XML sitemap).

I’ve been using it for some time now for a few client sites and it is a marvelous tool for understanding the Googlebot’s activity on a given site, and also for helping the Googlebot find the important content on a site. However it was only useful with Google. The use of the XML sitemap protocol had little to no understandable effect on rankings in the other two major search engines - Yahoo! and MSN. However, last week Yahoo! and MSN announced that they too will be adopting the Sitemap protocol and will offer a tool set to manage their search engines interaction with XML sitemaps. Yahoo!’s sitemap functionality is part of its already excellent Site Explorer tools, and MSN’s functionality is yet to be launched.

If you already have an XML sitemap, you just doubled (or tripled) the bang for the bucks (or the time) you put into it. Submit it to Yahoo! and enjoy. If you don’t have an XML sitemap, here are links to an array of tools (mostly free) that you can use to get one implemented.

• Official announcements from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
• Learn about the sitemaps protocol here: Sitemaps.org
• Create XML sitemaps for your site with these tools: sitemapspal.com, XML-Sitemaps.com or for your Wordpress site with this plug-in
• Submit your sitemaps on Google and Yahoo! (Microsoft is still testing their tool internally)

Need help getting your site ready to capitalize on the benefits of XML sitemaps? We’re always happy to help…

One of the most popular questions I get from new clients is “can we put one of those cool animated movies of my product/service/slogan/etc. as the first thing a users sees when they come to the site…and they we’ll go to the home page?” Wanting your site to move, play music, or speak to customers rather than just display text and images is a very common desire among business owners. Many people see these features as a way to set their sites apart from the competition. Do I agree with these views? The answer, as always, is “it depends.”

Many web marketing experts loathe the use of animation (specifically the use of Flash-based animation) in website design and development for several reasons. A few of those reasons are:

• Flash intros, even the ones with “skip intro” buttons, are only cool the first time your customer seems it. Do you want repeat traffic to your site? Are you prepared to put people through that animation EVERY time they come? Does that intro animation really help you get more leads/sales/etc? Or is it just something that you are the business owner think is “cool” but really acts as another barrier between you and your sale?
• Sites that are built entirely in Flash usually (but not always) are impossible for search engine spiders to crawl and index. The result? Sites built entirely in Flash rank terribly in search engines. Usually if you search the brand name in Google the home page will come up, but that’s it. No other rankings for all the other important keywords that potential customers are using if they don’t know the name of the company.
• Usually (but no always) Flash sites put more emphasis on looking and behaving cool and cutting edge than they do on usability. Always remember your sites goals (make a sale, gather a lead, get a newsletter subscription, etc). If your sites “cutting edge” interface is so cutting edge that people can’t find the “buy now” or “click here to sign up” button, it is ultimately a very expensive waste of time.

I happen to agree with all three of the points mentioned above, but I’m not an anti-Flash zealot either. It is possible to use Flash in ways that both mitigate the problems listed above, while capitalizing on the “cool” factor that Flash offers. Creating a search engine friendly all-Flash website is possible, but it takes quite a bit of extra work. A highly practiced Flash designer can create an all-Flash site that has very good usability and makes it easy for users to achieve goals on the site. As for Flash intros…I have no excuse for them. I can’t ever think of a reason to put a roadblock between your site and your users.

All that said, it is important to consider the additional cost of “cool.” Building an all-Flash website can cost considerably more than a regular HTML site. Building an all-Flash website that works well with search engines can cost even more. The question for the web marketer on a budget then becomes – just how important is cool? Can you achieve you site goals with conventional HTML pages? Do you really need Flash animation to get your customers to engage with your site/product/service? Far more often than not I would say the honest answer is no – you don’t need a Flash site. Sacrificing some of the immediate “cool” factor of an all-Flash site for HTML can often get the job done in less time, with less expense and better long-term results.

Have questions, comments? Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below. Need help with your site? We’re always happy to discuss.