As I dealth with my slow-ass computer trying to decide if it wanted to load the page I had just attempted to click through to, I noticed that there was a thumbnail for a visual representation of this evolution for which I am now even more excited to dive into. FINALLY, my browser loaded and the page came up with a much larger version of the thumbnail.

Enter disapointment, glee and happiness exit left. Can anyone please explain to me what is going on in this picture? I was able to follow the point for about 2.5 seconds but then as I made my way visually toward the middle of the image, I lost all hope. If you can help me understand it better, I’d surely appreciate it.

Here’s the other thing… This so called “Interactive Marketing” blog is missing one of the largest components needed for success in SEM (which last time I checked is a large part of interactive marketing)… CONTENT! If the author had decided to take 35 seconds and write more, I might have had a fighting chance to understand wtf he was trying to get across. So was not the case and I am now left writing this desperate cry out for assistance.

So go check out the interactive marketing evolution image here and let me know what the heck is going on.

SEO Snacks Article in A Nutshell:

1. Find an appropriate topic
2. Tips on writing SEO copy
3. Articles with a purpose
4. Editing your articles

The article does a great job of laying out what it takes to write a good article for SEO…hell, how to write a good article, period. I should probably be applying most of what was said but I find it more important to get this out to you – my beloved readers – in a timely manner. Go forth, write the ambiguously coined ‘good seo content’ and be happy.

As a side note/ post script… you might want to check out Greg Grothaus’ post on the Google Webmaster Central blog on duplicate content and multiple sites. Writing great content and knowing how (and where) to use it is important.

If you’re REALLY bored, read this article from Feb 2008 on writing content for search and see how different the two suggestions are. Interesting, isn’t it?

One of my recommendations for beginners and seasoned SEO professionals has always been to keep up with your basics. Search marketing tactics and techniques evolve so frequently that assuming you know the basics will get you in more trouble than you know. Case in point, SEOmoz recently reported in their June 22nd SEO Best Practices post that H tags may not be as important as they once seemed. That’s why I encourage you to watch this video even if you think you know basic SEO like the back of your hand.

Listen for my two favorite Matt Cutts quotes (warning they are a bit pg-13) and see if you hear’em…

1)    ”If they are from Digg.com people come on your blog and leave.”

2)    ”Who do you hate more, the Nazis or the hacker who hacked the Nazi website?”

I’m telling ya, it’s a good watch, you’ll enjoy it!

(video courtesy of Search Engine Land)

Check it out…

What should I eat for dinner? – make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) undertakes its mission by affecting change at the governmental and community level on the systems that support the full range of services needed to promote the child development process and provide parents with better conditions to be the kind of parents they want to be. Check out the PCA America Website and Blog.

So how do you win? This is the exciting part.

To win, all you have to do is send the following Tweet on Twitter:

Help Prevent Child Abuse and Enter to win a Camera bag from @FStopGear http://bit.ly/Myo0 PCA-America

The best part is you can enter as many as 10 times and then an extra 5x for every 1,000 followers you have (we added the limitation to try to prevent this from being abused – our main goal IS to raise awareness and Prevent Child Abuse). Just make sure that you send the Tweet exactly like it is written. Otherwise we won’t be able to track your entries.

Up for Grabs

1 Bard Courier Style Camera Bag from F-Stop

Rules

• To enter, Tweet this message!
• You can enter multiple times! (10 entry maximum with an extra 5 entries for every 1,000 followers you have)
• The more you Tweet the message, the better your odds of winning!
• Entries will be accepted until 11:59 PM, EST on Friday, March 27, 2009.

But Wait there’s More!!!

In addition to the free Bag / Belt, everyone that donates at least $10 directly to Prevent Child Abuse America will be entered to win one of FIVE $50 gift certificates from F-Stop. On Saturday the folks at PCA America will randomly pick 5 winners from everyone that donated and send them a $50 gift certificate from Jumeau.

Last but not least F-Stop has pledged to donate 25% of all sales between now and 11:59 PM, EST on Friday, March 27, 2009 to PCA. All you need to do is go to the F-Stop online store and use coupon code – “TwitterPCA” during the checkout.

The 2008 Total Estimated Cost of Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States report by PCA America, documents the pervasive and long-lasting effects of child abuse on children, their families, and society as a whole. Direct costs associated with child abuse and neglect including foster care services, hospitalization, mental health treatment, and law enforcement total more than $33 billion. Indirect costs of over $70 billion include loss of productivity as well as expenditures related to chronic health problems, special education, and the criminal justice system. To learn more about the PCA America report, visit www.preventchildabuse.org.

Check out Calvin Lee @MayhemStudios who is also helping prevent child abuse by giving away a free @Jumeau Belt or Bag. If you aren’t a member of Twitter, don’t worry; all you have to do is set up an account. It only takes a moment and it’s free! Good luck everyone!

One part of this process, however, is the actual naming of the groups you are creating. Group naming is tedious, difficult, and sometimes exhausting work. No one should have to do it alone.

That is why I am proud to announce the newest contest on Twitter, “Name Sarah’s Groups”.   Oh yeah baby!

Over the next seven days we will all submit creative names for Sarah Robinson (@sarahrobinson) to use for her tweetdeck groups. Yes, this is your chance to change someone’s life, make a difference in the world, cure cancer… okay, maybe not that last one. Well, maybe not any of those, but hey it should be fun anyway.

So here is how it’s going to work. Drop a comment into the bottom of this post with up to three group name suggestions and the type of people that would fit into each group. Next Friday Sarah will announce the winners.

If you win you will be showered with an amazing prize… bragging rights! Okay, so maybe it’s the economy’s fault (yeah thats it) but we can’t really offer anything other than the comfort of knowing your creativity has made someone else’s life a little easier.

Take a minute, turn your creative cranium on, and enter to win this amazing prize. You know you want to.

Oh, I know I don’t need to say it, but lets keep it clean people. Creative, but clean.

Here are a few examples/ideas to get you rolling…

Group Name – Twunkies
Members – Those who tweet WAY too much and need to be set aside so other users can get a chance to be heard.

Group Name – WTF
Members – Those who tweet random crap that never really makes sense, but have a level of entertainment worth keeping around.

Group Name – Stiffs
Members – Those who only tweet about work. Work work work. That’s all they are about.

Get the gist of it? Okay, your turn! Good luck!

Indexation and Ranking

With Flash, there are two very different issues at hand, indexation and ranking. Indexation referrs to having search engines index your Flash and add it to their index. Similar to how books are indexed at the library. Ranking refers to where a website shows up in the rankings of a results page after a search has taken place.

First things first, you must get your Flash website listed before you can start to worry abour ranking, so lets start there. For starters, let me say that I’m going to concentrate on Google for most of this but that doesn’t mean the information contained in this post doesn’t pertain to the other two major engines as well.

How A Flash Website is Indexed By Google

Indexation is obviously important because you won’t show up on search engine results pages (SERPS) unless Google was able to successfully crawl through your website. Not only that, the more pages you have on your website, the more content there is for Google to index. The more pages from your site that Google indexes, the higher your chances are of ranking for a relevant keyword.

One of the biggest draw backs to having a website built entirely out of Flash is that you reduce your chances of being indexed down to one. That’s it, just one. Uno. Singular. As it stands right now, the only page that will be indexed (error free anyway) is the HTML page your Flash is embedded in.

So this answers one of the myths out there. If someone told you that you won’t get into Google because you run an all Flash website, they are wrong. Yes, you can still get indexed and rank very well with an all flash website. But like everything else, there is a catch. You get one shot at it, and that’s it. Let me show you what I mean.

The image above shows two very basic website structures. They both provide the same amount of information in the same architecture that includes a home page and four information pages. The first is made with only HTML. It has a home page with four other pages under it. Each of these pages are crawlable and will get indexed as long as everything is put together in a search friendly way. The second website is built with Flash that loads the home page and changes to display an information page when a user clicks on a link within the Flash movie. As you can see in the image, unlike the HTML website, the Flash website is all housed within one HTML page. That means Google will only crawl one page instead of five. So in this instance, the HTML website will have five times the information indexed than the Flash site. Because of that, it also means the HTML site has five times the amount of visibility to customers who may search for the services provided on that website. Is that a risk you want to take? Is it worth the usability you gain with Flash? Now, before you freak out and decide to re-design your site with HTML, let me say that there are very good reasons for using an all Flash website so don’t be so quick to change things up. Ultimately though you are truly the only one that can answer these questions.

How To Find Out If Your Site Has Been Indexed

Finding out if your website has been indexed by the major search engines is pretty easy and the same search will work on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. When you use this (its called an operator), it will list all of the indexed pages on your website. That is, all the pages from your website that the search engine is aware of and will list in their rankings. Remember, it will NOT show you where the pages rank for your keywords. It only shows a list of pages that have been crawled. Here it is:

site:domain.com (Example – site:serpable.com )

If you’re running an all Flash website, you’ll either see a big message that says they couldn’t find your website at all, or it will only list one or two listings depending on if you have any non-Flash content on your website.

NOTE! - Don’t be surprised to see different numbers in each. Remember that Google, Yahoo! and MSN are three very different animals. Each one runs their engine in a unique way. My suggestion would be to begin with Google, then after you’re happy with the number of pages indexed in Google, move on to Yahoo!, then MSN.

How Long Does It Take To Get Indexed?

The short answer is to expect a wait time of two or three weeks if you just put a Flash website up and wait for the search engines to find it without any type of pro-active strategy. However, there are ways to get your new Flash website indexed much faster.

Here are a few tips to get your site indexed quickly. Please remember, search engines update their systems frequently. These techniques may change and or become ineffective over night so don’t be disappointed if you don’t get the results you wanted to see right away. SEO is a long-term game and you should expect to be in it for the long haul.

1. Build External Links: External links are links that point from someone else’s website to yours. Submit your website to the following free directories- photographydirectory.org, photographypros.com, submit an entry in thebestplacestophotograph.com, photoclicks.net, and the Yahoo! directory. There are more, many more. Use this search to find more free directories for you to submit to.
2. Comment On Other Websites and Blogs: On most blogs, when you submit a comment, you’re asked to provide a link back to your site. Make sure your comments follow the two R’s (Real and Relevant).
3. Become a part of the photo.net Family: If you haven’t found the amazing resources in photo.net, go check it out. Create a profile page that has a link to your site.
4. Facebook: Create two things on Facebook.com. 1 – if you don’t have a profile on Facebook do that first. 2 – create a page. A page is like a profile for your business or services. That link will tell you all you need to know about how to build them and what they are.

Use those four tactics and it will help you get indexed much faster than not doing anything at all. If you didn’t notice, all four are based around getting links back to your site and creating a brand for your photography on the web.

Building links will help your website get indexed, but its also something you’ll want to continue doing as long as you are using your website as a marketing tool. But this isn’t the place to go into that. I’ll cover link building at another time.

Once Indexed, Twice Shy…About Ranking

Once your Flash site is indexed by all three search engines, you can not be shy about moving up in the rankings. To do so, you’ll need to aggressively go after what you want. In my next post I’ll talk about the factors that go into ranking, how to get ranked for the keywords you want to target, how to STAY in the rankings you want, and how Flash will impact your efforts.

If you haven’t yet, subscribe to the SERPable RSS feed and you’ll know right away when I post the third installment of this series.

Happy SERPing!

Levi

Here it is, A no holds barred explanation of the relationship between Adobe Flash and SEO.

I’m going to show you what the big deal is, and how it will affect you if you’re using Adobe Flash on your website. I’ll shed some light on the difference between a site that is built entirely in Flash, and a site that houses some elements in Flash, and others in HTML. And more importantly, I’ll show you different ways you can still benefit from all the amazing things Flash can do to enhance the usability of your web property.

There is a lot of ground to cover so this will be broken down into bite sized chunks over the next two weeks. Once the entire series is completed, you’ll be able to download a complete copy of the ebook in its entirety.

So let’s dive right in…

Can Google Crawl Flash?

It wasn’t until earlier this year that Google announced their ability to crawl Adobe Flash. Up until that point, it was an area the search giant still struggled with a great deal. Search Engine Result pages (SERPs) came up with ugly attempts to index Flash that look more like junk than anything else. Result pages often times looked like this…

On June 30^th Google published a blog post stating that Adobe had delivered Flash reading software that gave them the ability to read the text and links within Flash. Woohoo! Yeah, not so fast guys. It is going to take Google an “unknown amount of time” to untangle the mess before we begin seeing some good results from it. I wouldn’t expect anything decent for at least a year.

Also, keep in mind that this new addition to Google’s ability only allows them to crawl the text and links within your Flash. That means your images, videos, and other effects within the site will still be left in the dark. If you want Google to index your photos, you must get them out of Flash.

A second blog post was released 12 hours after the first and goes into a bit more detail regarding Google’s new capabilities. If your geek side is urging to come out, go ahead and give it a read. Its not all that bad really.

Testing To See If Your Flash Was Crawled

Here is a good test to see if Google has indexed the text in your Flash site. Find two sentences of text within a section of your Flash (preferably other than first page) and do a search for the end of the first sentence and beginning of the second. Basically what we’re looking for is a string of text that is going to be unique. Then, do this search in Google:

Site:yourdomain.com yourkeyword

So an example would be something like this if my sample text was ‘blue widgets. But green widgets’

Site:serpable.com blue widgets. But green widgets

When I put that line into Google, the page with that text should come up in the top three if not number one. Chances are, if it doesn’t, Google still hasn’t crawled your Flash site yet to its fullest potential.

If nothing shows up, give it some time. If you need something to be indexed soon and can’t wait, email me and we can discuss what your options might be.

Indexation and Ranking

In the next post of this series I’ll be taking a look at how to get a Flash website indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Be sure to check in or better yet, subscribe to the serpable feed so it will be delivered hot off the press!

Happy SERPing!

Levi

IF I link out from my page, it will give away page rank – TRUE…. Usually.

The typical link will indeed pass Page Rank through a link to the page you’re linking to. In case you’re wondering, there are ways to keep your links from passing page rank; the most common being the use of a rel=nofollow in your links.

If my page is giving away Page Rank, it loses some of its own – FALSE

With the exception of linking to or from a number of spammy pages, your page will not lose the page rank it has by passing page rank to another. Think of it like your page having two pockets. One pocket holds the page rank it is going to keep and the other pocket holds the page rank it can give out through links. When you take from one pocket, it does not deplete that which is held in the other.

PR is THE MOST IMPORTANT factor that Google uses to determine my
ranking in the SERPs - FALSE

While page rank is still used as one of many variables to help determine rankings, it is by no means the most important factor Google employs to decide where your page will land in a SERP. Generally, you’ll see higher page rank on those in the top spots for popular key phrases, but not always.

PR is useless – FALSE
Page rank is still used by Google as a tool to help determine such things as crawl rate (how often your page is crawled), rankings, and more. The important thing to remember here is that this tool is never used by itself. Its like a socket wrench. The wrench alone is useless without a bit on the end of it.

Once my page rank hits a level, it won’t go back down - FALSE
The factors that your page rank is based on can change so in effect, so can your page rank.

If you have a website, and have not done so already, its about time you started paying attention to some of the social media powerhouses around the web. Your ability to network, market your services and products, and have a little bit of fun every now and then is greatly enhanced with these sites. Here’s the thing though, for each one you have to create a social profile. So how do you let users of your site/blog know what networks you are on and how to find you on each?

Sure, if a user is an avid Facebook user they’ll probably just search for you and hopefully find you on their own. But why leave it to chance? A standard rule in marketing is to take as much chance out of the equation as possible.

That is why I like this handy little widget so much. Widgetbox.com delivers a widget that you can plug into your sidebar as a list of your social profiles. If you want to know what the social profile widget looks like just take a peak at my sidebar. I’m using it to list my social profiles for a few of the networks I’m involved in on a regular basis.

How This Community Profile Widget Works

One of the beauties built into this widget is how easy it is to get your hands on. See at the bottom of my badges where it says ‘Make Your Own Badge”? Now hold on, don’t go clicking on it quite yet. I’ll be done here in just a second, then you can go to town. Anyway, you’d click on that and go over to their site where you can add your social profile links. It looks like this…

Once you have all your social profile URLs entered in the list on the right hand side, hit the green button and this will show up.

Copy the code into your sidebar template and whamo… your done!

I’ve also been impressed with the widgetbox.com community. You may want to consider adding your blog or website to their network. Who knows, you may find a new source of traffic!

If you have any questions about adding the code to your sidebar template, send me an email at lwardell@serpable.com and I’ll see what I can do to help out.

Cheers!