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

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 create SEO-friendly JavaScript menus

JavaScript is not SEO friendly.
You can find this statement all over the web.

What does it mean and is it really true?

I’ll try to answer.

What SEO-friendly means?
SEO friendly or Search-engine friendly website is a website which is easily crawled by the search engine robots. JavaScript in page navigation can stop the crawlers from accessing some pages but this doesn’t mean you can’t use JavaScript in website menus. As long as you have anchor links your pages are accessible.

For example you can have a list with your links animated as a drop-down menu. You must have

<a href=”http://mysite/my_inner_page” >menu item</a>

in your list items and your inner pages will be easily accessible by all web crawlers.

So, JavaScript can be used in optimized websites and if it is used cleverly it won’t harm the SERP results.

42 tips to get more traffic

1. Use high quality content.
2. Keep adding content on a regular base.
3. Use SEO friendly URLs.
4. Use keywords in page titles.
5. Use linkbaits.
6. Use pictures.
7. Use videos.
8. Use presentations.
9. Be creative.
10. Be unique.
11. Write about hot topics.
12. Write controversial posts.
13. Do a keyword research.
14. Tag your content.
15. Remove broken links.
16. Study your logs. Value what visitors like.
17. Build a brand.
18. Write press releases.
19. Post to related mailing lists.
20. Invite guest bloggers.
21. Be a guest blogger.
22. Do offline advertising.
23. Make lists like this one.
24. Submit to directories.
25. Submit to social bookmarking sites.
26. Write articles and submit them to article directories.
27. Use trackbacks.
28. Comment on other blogs.
29. Use your links in forums signatures.
30. Run contests.
31. Give away freebies.
32. Join Twitter and make a community.
33. Tweet regularly.
34. Join Digg and make a lot of friends.
35. Join SpicyPage.
36. Join MyBlogLog.
37. Join Blog Catalog.
38. Create MySpace page and make some friends.
39. Answer questions on Yahoo answers with link to your blog.
40. Use StumbleUpon.
41. Add your blog to Technorati.
42. Use viral marketing.

How to get more traffic – 15 easy and free ideas to drive targeted traffic to your site

Getting more and more traffic is the main goal for every webmaster. Getting enough real traffic sometimes is very hard to achieve. Your niche may be overpopulated or not so modern any more. Anyway there are people who need your information and services; you just need to find them. Here is a short list of ideas how to get more targeted traffic.

1. Submit your site to search engines
2. Submit your site to web directories
3. Write articles and submit them to article directories
4. Write press release
5. Make a blog and post regularly with reviews of latest updates
6. Update your site regularly - search engines like regular updates
7. Make promo videos and submit them to YouTube and other related services
8. Make cool channel with many related videos on YouTube
9. Participate in social media websites like twitter and facebook
10. Participate in Digg, Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking and voting services
11. Use email marketing
12. Comment in blogs in the same niche
13. Post in forums in the same niche
14. Make freebies and give them away
15. Make a contest related to your site

Related posts:

Link building - are you doing it right?
How to successfully market on Twitter?

Canonical link element?

What is canonical link element?
This is a new, optional directive, that helps to specify the original url of a page.

How it works?
For example, let’s have a page with parameters like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?param1=aaa&param2=bbb

Parameters can be session id or anything else. If their value is not relevant to the page we can specify our original (canonical) url in the head section of the page:

<head>

…

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/”>

…

</head>

We can specify canonical url to a section/page:

<head>

…

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/somepage.php”>

…

</head>

In short - canonical link element helps identify different links to one page.


More
More about canonical link element can be found at Matt Cutts blog here. And here is Google help information about it.

Posting - how often?

How often I need to post in my blog to get on the top of the search engines?

This is a question that many newbie (and not only) SEO experts ask all over the net. And the truth is that no one can tell you the answer of this question. The answer is different for different blogs - for some people posting four times a week is the best, for other this doesn't work at all.

Some experts says - the more often, the better. I am not exactly convinced in this logic. Of course more posts will help in getting traffic and if they are with good content they will grab the readers attention to the blog. But not all of us have enough time to write cool, long post every day.

So for me works another tactic. I think that it is better to test for periods of one to two months with different frequency. You will find the best solution for your target market without spending too much time writing and wondering on the next topic.

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.

How to learn SEO? Top 3 ways

How to learn search engine optimization? What is the easiest way to learn SEO?
I'll try to answer these questions here.

• SEO books - there are many SEO books out there. Some cheap (even free) and some really expensive ones. If you want to spend some time quietly reading in the garden, this is the way for you.
  


• SEO blogs - like this one. You can learn some basics from different SEO blogs and websites. Be careful for harmful tips. Don't forget to read the relevant search engine guidance.
  


• SEO forums - seo experts tend to gather in large online communities to share some tips and ideas. This is the best way to up to date with the current SEO trends.
  

Fast SEO tip: Use keywords in the page titles

Why to pay attention to the title?
The title tag has great value in a SEO campaign. Most of the search engines pay a lot of attention to the page title.

So what to use in the title tag?
The worst possible idea is the website URL or name only.
The best title tag must contain a good selection of keywords, set in a human readable manner.
Don’t use very long title tags because search engines like Google will consider that for spam. Use short and explaining title with the strongest of your keywords.

If your website has multiple pages use different, describing titles for any of them.

Blogs
One of the best tactics for search engine optimization for blogs is to use the post titles for page titles.

Forums – often webmasters use only the forum’s name in the title. Better approach is to use the topics name for this. It will help the forum to be easily targeted in the searches.

FAST SEO TIPS: 10 easy ways to improve your traffic

Just some basic tips for a good results in SEO.

1. Create Google Sitemaps – that will help Google to index your pages better.
2. Add your site to DMOZ.ORG
3. Add your site to free search engines.
4. Publish your RSS Feeds
5. Add your site to free web directories with good pagerank
6. Add your site to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon
7. Use social networks to advertise your site
8. Create account in Technorati
9. Take participation in SEO Forums
10. Add your site with a relevant text to your forums’ signature.