How to optimize a flash site for search engines

Many people still believe that search engines can’t crawl flash content. This may be true for small search engines but Google can actually read and index flash content. Of course if you go to a SEO company, asking for optimization of flash website, there is a huge probability that they will turn you down or ask for a huge amount of money.

SEO of a flash website is not that unusual or complicated, compared to optimization of standard, HTML site. Google can crawl and index the text content and discover links of all swf file formats. At the moment of writing this, Google bot can’t index images, stored in a flash. So flash is not appropriate for an image gallery, if you want to get traffic from your images. It’s a pity because Flash is very suitable for designing cool and shiny photo galleries; I think that soon Google will handle flash images.


External content
The latest update of Google flash handling capabilities was the ability to crawl external resources, loaded by a flash file.


Flash for navigation
You can see many articles with advice not to use flash for site navigation but you can go around the problem easily, just submit your sitemap to Google.

So, how to optimize flash content for search engines?

• On-site optimization
  Google bot behaves like any human visitor, it will fill forms, press buttons and view the content. The bot can understand text content and hyperlinks so you need to have accessible text content within your flash website.
• Off-site optimization
  You need to do all the standard SEO routines – submitting to link and articles directories, forum posting, blog commenting, Social Media Optimization, Social Bookmarking.
  

Further reading:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html - Flash indexing with external resource loading

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html - Flash Indexing

4 reasons your pages to be deindexed by Google

Pages that are indexed by Google appear on the result pages. Pages that aren’t indexed or are deindexed for some reason don’t appear in the SERP and don’t bring SE visitors. So if you have a website with over thousand pages, only the pages that are indexed by Google will appear in the search engine results page.



Duplicate content
Even though Google have several videos where they claim duplicate content is not so dangerous for website ranking, it may lead to loosing positions and even disappearing from the SERP.
Blog platforms often show the same content in different pages – monthly archives, label pages and so on. Try to minimize the harm through robots.txt and canonical links.

Penalties
Unprofessional search engine optimization can harm your site and case it to be deindexed from Google. It is better to avoid fast and aggressive methods of link building.

Untrusted site
Thousand pages on the net have some kind of malicious code that harm their visitors. Google tries to ensure its users safety and de-index such pages.
For some reason Google may think that your site is untrusted or even harmful.

Downtime
When SE bots try to crawl your pages and
If your server is down when SE bots try to crawl your pages, they may disappear from the SERP. You can check unreachable pages and other crawl errors through Google Webmaster Tools.

Twitter followers

Social websites like Twitter are valuable tools for online marketing. With the constantly increasing number of users Twitter is tempting place for internet marketers. But Twitter marketing don’t always work, many people are disappointed after a try. As any other type of optimization and marketing, Twitter marketing needs a carefully designed strategy to succeed.

Mass following
Mass following – this strategy doesn’t work so well any more. While Twitter accounts are increasing their number, the real people using this service are relatively same count and their number isn’t growing so fast. Of course many accounts will follow you back – some of them use auto follow back scripts, others just follow all of their followers. But how many of them are real people? And how many of them will read your tweets? Here is the time to ask: Why do you want more followers? Is it because you want somebody to read what you have written? If it is so you need real people not empty accounts or bots. Even most of the SEO specialists and Twitter marketers don’t read other people tweets. They usually follow more than thousand people, it is totally impossible to keep up with all.

Followers
One reason Twitter became so popular in a short period is that it is easily used for marketing products, services and brands. Large numbers of Twitter users are actually there not to participate in the community but to promote. Some have gone even further with automated posting and similar techniques.

Following blindly or using mass follow tools will get you large number of followers but your tweets won’t get any attention. No one will read your messages, no one will retweet good ideas and no one will follow your links.

Many people complain that Twitter doesn’t work for them and this is the main reason. Using mass follow tools get them only low-value followers. So they spammed their bot-followers with their link and surprise! No visitors from Twitter …

Twitter marketing is more than getting random followers.
You need followers who are interested in your business and your tweets. Getting such followers is hard and time consuming. You must build your name like building a brand. Being an expert in your sphere will make people to take you seriously.

Interact
People are more likely to pay attention to someone who talks with them. Real personal messages, answers to questions, comments on relevant tweets are all ways to interact with your followers.

How to promote a blog

Do you need to market your blog?

If you want to make money from your blog you need to market it as any other product out there. Blogging is not just writing and publishing articles. Visitors and income won’t just fall from nowhere upon you. You need to work hard to optimize your blog, create quality content, and promote them.

Content quality

In order to make money from your blog you need to have content that can bring people to visit again and again. Here is a set of simple rules that can help you:

• Writing high quality content is the first and most important rule.
• Use spell checking and grammar tools.
• Read your post twice before publishing.
• Find someone to read your post and find errors and misunderstandings before posting.
• Write on valuable and popular topics.
• Use simple but professional design.
• Make your blog SEO friendly.

Ways to promote a blog
There are several basic ways to promote a blog.

1. PPC advertising
2. Social media marketing – promote your blog in services like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace.
3. SEO – hire a SEO company or do the job your self. SEO can bring you tons of targeted, SE traffic.
4. Forums – you can successfully market your blog on forums, especially your niche forums. Join some and give a try.
5. Blog commenting or guest posting – participate on other blog communities, share useful and relevant information.

HTML basics for SEO specialists

You need to learn the basics if you intend to do SEO yourself. HTML is very important for both on-page and of page SEO optimization.

You need to know how to structure a web site, what are the value and the meaning of the basic HTML tags and how search engines see them. During a link building campaign you must know which online directories, services and sites provide quality links.

Basic HTML tags you need to know

<html></html> - this tag tells that this is a HTML document. It is the root element of HTML document.
<head></head> - this tag is a container of all head elements like title, meta-tags, styles and so on.
<title></title> -this is your page’s title. It must be located in the head of the document. The title tag is very important – it provides basic information about your page to both human visitors and search engines. SE use titles in their result pages. The title must be short and descriptive with one or two keywords in it.

<body></body> - this tag defines the document body, all text and formatting elements must go here.

<a></a> - an anchor tag. This is the most important HTML tag for you as a SEO specialist. The anchor can be used for both creating a link to another HTML document or a bookmark within the same document.
The anchor tag has several attributes but the most important of them is href. It tells the link’s destination.
Another important attribute is rel. It tells the relation between this document and its target document. If a link is marked as nofollow (rel=nofollow), it says to search engines that this pages links to unverified document and it don’t want to pass its rank and quality to the linked document.
The text between the opening and closing anchor tags is the text that will explain to humans and search engines what kind of page is on the other way of this link. Search engines pay special attention to this text so it is the best place to put a keyword. Both search engines and human visitors pay special attention to the text around a hyperlink or anchor. Humans decide to visit a page according to this text. Search engines index the page content according to this text again. Humans and search engines are quite similar, aren’t they?

If you want to learn more:
What do you need to know about links


Headings - <h1> to <h6> - these tags are used to define HTML headings. The lower the number the larger is the text shown on your browser. Headings are great way to mark titles like blog post titles or category titles for example. This blog by default has several posts on a page and each post title is marked with a heading.

<img> - this tag defines an image. Here you have two SEO-important attributes. The first is src and marks the location of the image. The second is alt and is used to mark an alternative text to be shown to the visitors. Search engines aren’t exactly humans and can distinguish what is on the image. They use the other elements on the same page and the alt element of the image tag to index the image. Using a keyword here will help you get traffic from image searches.

Read more:
Getting traffic from your images

You can learn more HTML here.

What do you need to know about links?

Q: What I need to know about hyperlinks?
A: A link is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow. A hyperlink is marked with an anchor element, here is its most usual syntax:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/">SEO blog</a>

In the above example we have an element anchor - "a" with "href" or hypertext reference to our document – in our case – this blog. The text in the link tells the viewer or the search engine what document the anchor links. It is an optional text and can contain anything.
An anchor element can have several attributes:

• href– points to link destination.
• title – link title.
• id – the element id.
• target – this attribute is used mostly for creation of new browser window so the visitor won’t leave the current page. This is achieved through target=”_blank” or target=”_new”. It can be used also for opening documents into another frame.
• class - this is not interesting from a SEO point of view. The class attributes says what CSS class to be applied on the corresponding link element.

A link with all this stuff will look like this:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/" title="SEO strategy blog" target="_blank" class="CSSClass">SEO blog</a>

You can use images in the link or combine different html elements – for example:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/"><img alt="SEO Strategy blog" src="our_banner.jpg"></a>

A link can have an empty href, or use "#" in the place of href location (href="#"). Most of the time, these links are used through JavaScript and can’t be crawled by the search engines.

nofollow
Nofollow is an attribute used to instruct the search engines that the hyperlink must not pass any value to the linked document. This hyperlink must not affect target's ranking. It is used mostly for blog comments or bookmark websites, where the site owner has no way to track all linked resources. Example of nofollow usage:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">SEO blog</a>

Q: How to check if a link is correct?
To check if a website links properly to you, you must see the source. Your hyperlink must have a href attribute with your site in it and without a nofollow attribute.

How to get indexed faster - for blogspot blogs

Google indexing is often crucial for any website or blog out there. Sometimes your content gets indexed fast and sometimes it takes a week or even more to appear in the result pages.

There are some things you can do to make Google index your articles faster.

• Publish your full RSS – these days Google prefers to index blogger blogs RSS feeds rather than the full pages. The crawler may visit your blog once in a while but if you publish your RSS, Google will index your new content in a matter of minutes. You can try and publish only short snippets but then your full post will be indexed rarely.
  
  
• Get links from big and hourly updated websites in your niche. Your links must be regular, not marked as nofollow. High quality links will make the search engine pay more attention to your content.
  
  
• Update often. Google likes the fresh content and will index your pages faster if you update them often enough. Even now you can see traffic bursts after posting new articles. Make schedule and post daily.
  
  
• Quality content. I may repeat myself but quality content will bring you success. Satisfied visitors will link back at you and will share your link with friends. Your backlinks count and popularity will increase.
  
  

How to make your blog a money-maker?

Your first task is getting enough traffic. But traffic is almost never enough. So getting traffic. You can achieve this with various SEO techniques like link building, forum posting, on-site optimization. Traffic can be obtained through social media networks like digg, twitter, facebook.

Let’s assume you’ve finished the first part and now you have a decent blog with many visitors. Now you need to monetize your traffic.

First and one of the most widely used – PPC and CPM advertising networks. The profit of PPC advertising depends on many things but mainly your income will be according to your traffic, CTR and CPC. CTR stands for click-trough rate and it depends on the ads position and visibility. CPC means cost per click and depend on your niche. There are niches with high CPC like finance, mortgages, SEO. CPM advertising networks are relatively similar to PPC ones, but your income will depend on page impressions. Gaming and lifestyle niches tend to perform well.

You can make money through affiliate marketing. Many companies offer affiliate programs for people to sell their products. You can even join an affiliate network like ClickBank or Commission Junction.

Other way to make money from your blog is selling ebooks or other digital products. There is a big market for WordPress and Blogger templates.

Short list of useful blogging tips

Blogs are taking over the world. They are everywhere and about everything. Everyone can have a blog. And people make money from their blogs. You can see good blogs and bad blogs, seo blogs, entertainment blogs, personal or even an autoblogs.

How to create a popular blog? It is not an easy task and many people start and then give up.

Here is my list of advices for beginner bloggers:

• Establish a blogging schedule
• Write good content
• Don’t copy blog posts
• Copy successful bloggers
• Use common sense
• Offer useful information
• Get cool and easy to understand blog theme
• Have simple blog navigation
• Select a niche and stick on it
• Comment on other blogs in your niche
• Participate in comments discussions
• Participate in forums
• Create videos
• Use photos
• Drink your morning coffee before posting
• Think before posting
• Use twitter to promote
• Use sense of humor
• And have fun
• Learn SEO
• Read blogging news
• Be creative
• Create goals
• Follow your goals
• Analyze, analyze, analyze (your visitors, traffic, achievements)

Optimize your blog for search engines and human visitors

Blogging is a popular way to express your self and share your thoughts with the world. With the invasion of PPC services blogging became a way to earn a living. This is the reason for increasing number of blogs in any niche.
Getting new visitors become harder and harder in this competitive environment. Many niches became saturated.
Every blog needs more visitors despite the reason it’s created. To draw more visitors you need to put in some efforts.

Content
Have you heard the phrase “Content is king”. It’s a controversial phrase but not fully true or false. Good content will bring you loyal visitors. Good content can make your loyal visitors to share your blog with their friends. And search engines like what people like (most of the time).
You need to update your content regularly to get the attention of the search engines. The biggest ones give most credits on new and regularly updated content so if you want to go up in SERPS update, update, update!

Links
Link building is very important for your SEO campaign. You need quality links from prestigious websites with high PageRank.
Of course you can start with submitting your website link to many blogging networks like TopOfBlogs, BlogCatalog. Find a list of dofollow social bookmarking sites and submit your post links to them. Create both regular and deep links.
Submit your blog to general and niche link directories.

Forums
Find a list of forums related to your niche and start posting in them. Create fun signatures with your link in them. Post controversial topics and use linkbaits. Forums can bring you readers and links so don’t forget to write quality posts.

Platform
Best blogging platforms by my opinion are blogger and wordpress. There are many pros and cons to use either of them but I won’t discus which is better here. Both are well optimized and you won’t have many SEO problems with them.

Design
You need human and SEO friendly design. To be SEO friendly your site needs to satisfy several requirements. Here are some of them:

• Use regular links for menus.
• Use tags and categories.
• Don’t use JavaScript for menu navigation.
• Your main content must come before the sidebars.
• Use SEO-friendly urls.
• Optimize your images.
• Don’t create deep navigation trees. Every article must not be further than three clicks away from your homepage.

Social Networks
Join Twitter, Digg, FaceBook and start to make friend and followers. Select your best posts and share their links with few words of explanation. Write tweets and posts with 20% to 50% general talk, 30% your niche information and 20% with your links. Don’t spam with links cause people tend to unfollow persons with such behavior.


Work regularly. Don’t stop to improve your blog. Learn from other bloggers and don’t be afraid to experiment. Many successful bloggers have published their stories on internet – read them and find your inspiration.

Good on-site optimization

What is on-site optimization?
On-site optimization is the SEO process of improving the quality of a website for better position in SE. If you want more traffic you need to work on your site optimization.

Basics of the on-site optimization:

• Title tags
  Optimizing the title tags is the most important part of the on-site optimization. Make sure your title tags are context-related, short and meaningful. Use unique title text for each page. Include one or two related keywords with high search volume near the beginning. (Don’t confuse keywords with high search volume with high paying ones)


• Page content
  Focus to have high quality articles designed for human readers. Keyword stuffing isn’t good idea. If you want returning visitors make useful content. Optimize the articles with bold text, H1, H2, H3 titles, lists and so on. It must be easy for the reader to find, what he is searching for. Don’t use Frame and iFrame tags for your text and articles.


• Site architecture
  Use SEO oriented website architecture. Each article must have its own page with optimized and relevant title and URL. Use tag clouds and categories. Use shallow link trees – every page must be maximum three clicks away from your primary one.


• SEO friendly URLs
  The URLs must be as optimized as possible. The category and article link must be meaningful. It is better to use http://website/seo than http://website/category3 . The same is valid for the articles’ URLs.


• JavaScript, Flash
  JavaScript and Flash are bad choice for menus and navigation. Web robots are not good enough in working with them. Some Search Engines can crawl Flash content in a certain extent but don’t rely on that. Optimization for a Flash website is very hard work.


• Links and Menus
  Use meaningful text with keywords for your menus and links to inner pages. Use full URLs to your inner pages rather than short ones. For example it is better to use href=http://website/books/fantasy.html than href=”books/fantasy.html”. Many web designers use the second because it is easier for their work. Insist on having the full URL in all your inner links.


• Images
  You need to optimize your images to get traffic from image search engines. Keywords in image URL and alt text are the basics.


• robots.txt
  Robots exclusion standard or in other words robots.txt file tells the crawlers which pages to include and which to omit. It’s important to have correct robots.txt with the desired information in it. Consider that some bots ignore it.


• sitemap.xml
  Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to the biggest search engines. You can submit your sitemap to Google here and to Bing here.


• Custom 404 page
  Create custom 404 (not found) page with link to your main page.


• Google Tools
  Use Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Keywords Tool to optimize and validate your site and to track its stats and traffic.


• Fresh Content
  Don't forget to upload new content daily.

Search Engine Optimization is a constant process. You need to update, optimize and analyze your site constantly. SEO successes are result of many efforts.

Link building – are you doing it right?

Link building plays very important role in every search engine optimization campaign. Quality links bring traffic, reputation and rank to your site. Many webmasters spend hours every day submitting their links to various web directories, search engines, forums, blogs, social media websites. These efforts are not always rewarded. Do you spend a lot of time link building without effect?

What are the steps for successful link building? Some basic rules:

• Article submission. Select good and popular article directories. It is better to post less quality articles to few high traffic article directories than spam with many low quality articles directories with no or low page rank and few visitors.



• Social bookmarking. Make respectful accounts in some of the best social bookmarking services. Bookmark your links together with some other high class sites.



• Forum posting. Select few popular dofollow forums in your target niche and mix with the crowd. Make creative topics and help people with advices. Use keywords for your signature links, not just the usual click here.



• Blog commenting. Again, it is important to select dofollow blogs. Good comments can even bring you loyal visitors.



• Link exchange. Many search experts say that link exchange any more but I’ve seen it actually works pretty well.



• Link directories. I’ve made a post Good and bad link directories – it’s about the quality of the link (if there is any).



• Spamming won’t help you. Just posting your link over and over again to forums and blogs won’t rise your site pagerank. It even can damage it.

The results won’t come always fast. Patience is also very important. Don’t give up because things don’t occur with the speed you want.

The most important SEO things to do after writing a cool new article

So you have written a new article and you think that it is cool and fascinating? Maybe it is so, but if no one knows about it, you won’t gain any profit.

What are the basics, what to do after writing new post or article?

First - figure out a describing title. It must contain the correct keywords for your article and blog/site. Select a meaningful subtitle – something that people will use in the search engines to found you. Always tag your titles and use bold to emphasize on some of the text. Your article must be human and search engines friendly, all of them must find easily what they need.

After finishing the article altering – it is time for making many deep links. Post your article to your favorite social network websites. Ask your network friends for opinion on the topic.
Post your article to digg and other voting and social bookmarking sites.
Select some of the biggest forums in your niche and start a discussion about the topic, ask for readers’ opinion.
Add your new link to the best local forums if you are targeting a specified location.

These are some of the basics in making a blog a little more popular.

Basic resources for SEO beginners, resume

What are the basic resources for anyone who wants to be a SEO expert? It is a rather complex question. There are a lot of SEO books, tools, blogs and so on. So what is the essential from all this.

First of all don’t forget that the search engine optimization exists only because the existence of the search engines. The main reading must be centered on the SE documentation and blogs.

I made a short list of basic resources for SEO beginners.



http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Google Webmaster Central. Every SEO enthusiast must start from here.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webpublishers/ - Yahoo Search Help, if you want good ranking in Yahoo, this step is important.

Blogs

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ - Official Google Blog

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ - Google news for webmasters

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Anyway if you are interested in ranking good in other search engine the fist place to stop and ask questions is its documentation, online help or blog.