SEO For Flash - Webmaster central blog

"As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google's YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash."

Original post

Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface

This guide should help you find your way around the new system.



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How Search Engines Treat No Follow : No Follow Doesn't Mean No Index

Google, Yahoo and Ask.com sound off on their treatment of the No Follow attribute and clear webmaster confusion that links from sites such as Wikipedia using this attribute have no value.



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The best keyword suggestion tools

Google adwords Keyword Tool

Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyworddiscovery Free Search Term Suggestion Tool

MSN adCenter Labs Keyword Group Detection

Fix your websites URL's to increase traffic study shows

The case study showed that this simple change alone had a significant impact on the sites search engine visibility. Nothing else was changed or optimized during the study. The number of indexed pages in Google almost doubled, tripled in Yahoo! and almost quadrupled in MSN.



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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Get a more complete picture about how other sites link to you

"For quite a while, you've been able to see a list of the most common words used in anchor text to your site. This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results.

Now we've enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we've expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we're aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation."

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The importance of a semantic URL - Robert’s talk

What is a semantic URL?

Semantic URLs, also known as Friendly URLs, are made up of logical parts, therefore showing the actual name of the specific web page you’re watching, while at the same time displaying where it belongs in the web site hierarchy. Let me give you some examples:

Bad URLs

• http://www.example.com/?id=547
• http://www.example.com/aspx?id=547&product=785
• http://www.travel-example.com/?continent=3&country=15&city=54

Good URLs, made from the samples above

The bad examples above can actually mean something like this in reality:

• http://www.example.com/contact
• http://www.example.com/products/screwdriver
• http://www.travel-example.com/europe/sweden/stockholm

See just how much better it gets? Another thing I dislike is when file extensions, like .php or .aspx, are part of the URL. What’s ridiculous about that, too, is that isn’t the content of the PHP or ASP.NET file that is presented, its the content that it generated that is shown to the end user. I’m all against the usage of any file extension in the URL, but the only one that would make sense at least some sense is .html, because that is what is served to the web browser.

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