Search Engine Optimization Tactics: Local Search + How To Use Graphics and Flash

admin    Google     Engine, flash, Graphics, Local, Optimization, Search, Tactics

With the global economy struggling, acquiring new customers is top of mind for most organizations.

Did you know that 50-70% of consumer and business purchasers start with a search engine like Google? If your website doesn’t appear at the top of a search engine results page (sponsored ads or organic search results), you’re losing potential customers to companies that do rank higher.

What can you do? I’ll share with you my top strategies and tactics that can help you acquire new customers via search engine optimization and advertising.

1. Local Search Engine Advertising. For businesses that serve specific geographic regions (i.e. Denver, Colorado), you can create search engine ads in Google and Yahoo that only appear to people in your area.

How does this work? A search engine like Google uses a computer’s IP address and other information to discover where someone is searching (including city and state).

Why does Google care where a person is located? Google’s mission is to give their end users the best search results possible. So if I need a someone to walk my dog in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it does me little good to receive a paid search result from Arizona. This is a real example – my brother has a petsitting business, and I’ve used local Google search engine advertising to drive new clients to his organization.

Thus Google (and the others) tries to match search results to the geographic location of the person searching.

How does Google make money? Google gives businesses and organizations the ability to display paid advertisements (sponsored results) on search results pages. These ads are triggered by keywords you choose (more on this in a different strategy).

You don’t have to pay for your ad to display; you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad. The technical term is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. The more relevant your ad (more on this later), the less you have to pay for specific keywords, and the higher up you will appear in the sponsored advertising results.

Local Search CPC Ads. In Google Adwords, you can create an advertising campaign that will target someone in a specific city or state. You can even specify a 5, 10 or 25 mile radius from a specific location (like your retail showroom or office). Below your local ad, Google will place the name of your local area (i.e. Denver, Colorado)… making it more likely that someone searching in your area will choose your organization vs. an out-of-town competitor.

Local CPC Ads are usually a more cost effective option than a national search engine advertising campaign. As a general rule of thumb, the more geographically targeted and specific you can be, the less money you’ll need to pay to acquire new customers. And make sure you have conversion tracking code placed on your site, so you can measure and track how much you’re paying for each new customer via local search engine advertising.

2. Don’t Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics. Search engines are really good at reading text. But they’ve very easily confused. And if Google gets confused when it crawls through your site, you won’t rank very high in search results.

Search engines, for example, can’t read words that are contained in graphics or flash animation. So if your company’s name is only contained in a graphic on your site, this content is ‘invisible’ to a search engine. Same thing goes for product or service names.

The root of the problem lies with graphic designers. Graphic designers are really good at building graphics. And don’t take this to mean I don’t like graphic designers. (I employ a bunch of them, but they know how to do SEO-friendly design.)

But most websites are designed by graphic designers who are really good at building graphics, and less interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It takes a bit more time to have content placed in text, and use a stylesheet to format it so that a search engine can read it. Especially when it’s just so easy to create a good looking graphic in photoshop.

Here’s an example of a site that uses all flash (and is invisible to search engines):

http://www.gelazzi.com/

While it looks pretty to humans, to Google the content is completely invisible. Here’s how the site appears to Google in it’s cache:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-qvxrs72gygJ:www.gelazzi.com/+http://www.gelazzi.com/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1

(You can see that there is no text or content that appears)

Even if you’re not worried about organic search positioning, but are doing paid search engine marketing (like Google Adwords), it’s important that the content on your site is easily digested by a search engine.

Why? Google Adwords ranks the pages on your website, and compares it to your keywords and ad copy. The more relevant Google ranks the text on your site, the less you’ll have to pay for a sponsored ad on Google (and the higher your position).

In Summary: Don’t confuse search engines by keeping your content ‘locked up’ in graphics. It’s a small little detail in the web design process, but one that will pay dividends for a long, long time with increased search results.

3. Title Tags & Why They Matter. When you search in Google, the search results on the next page each start with a blue underlined link.

What displays in this blue link is usually what is contained in the title tag of a web page. The keywords you placed in the search box are usually boldfaced in the search results.

So, just what is a title tag, and why does it matter for search engine positioning?

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (w3.org), the Title tag was designed to help people “identify the contents of a document.” When people view individual web pages out of context (often via search), context-rich page titles help tell the visitor a summary of the page.

Instead of a title like “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, web designers should supply a title such as “Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping” instead.

Google and other search engines use these rich contextual clues as a way to hone its search results.

On a web page, the title tag is part of the HTML code. Here’s what the code looks like on Customer Paradigm’s site:

Title: Customer Paradigm: Website Design, Development, Email Marketing, Content Management, PHP programming

Most end users won’t see the title tag*. But the title tag is what a subject ine is to an email campaign: It entices the end user to pay attention and open the page to read more.

Top Five Most Common Mistakes for Title Tags:

A. Untitled: When many of the popular programs create a new HTML page, it puts ‘Untitled’ into the title tag. It’s up to the Web designer to change this… and since most users don’t see it, sometimes they forget to change it.

B. No Title Tag: Like the “Untitled” tag, another key mistake is simply leaving out the title tag. If you do a view source (Internet Explorer: Right Click and select View Source), and the title tag doesn’t appear… then you don’t have a title tag.

C. “About” Tag: Another common mistake for title tags is to have the title tag refer to a section of your website. But a title tag that reads, “About” doesn’t tell me much about what the company or website is “About.” Instead, have it read:

Title: Customer Paradigm – About the Company: Website Development & Marketing, Email Deployment and php programming

This is sure to get more keywords into the title tag, and if you’re searching for a company, you instantly know what they do.

D. No Company Name In Title Tag: We recommend putting your company name at the beginning of the title tag, so that people can quickly see your company’s name when they search.

E. Same Title Tag on Multiple Pages: You should have a unique title tag for each page of the site. Why? As each page is unique, you should have a title tag that describes it’s unique content.

* Here’s where they might interact with the title tag:

– The title tag is displayed at the top left of most people’s browser window.

– Page titles are used as the default description for a person’s bookmarks when someone bookmarks a site.

– Visually impaired people use title tags to summarize the contents of a page before they have a text-to-speech reader read the contents of the page.

– These, along with Google’s search results, are the only places end users actually see the title tag.

What Google’s Improved Flash Indexing Means for Your Website

admin    Google     flash, Googles, Improved, Indexing, Means, Website

What has changed?

Google can now index the textual content in SWF files of all kinds, including buttons, menus and self-contained Flash websites.

Google can also discover URLs that appear in Flash files and it adds these URLs to the crawling pipeline.

What has not changed?

Google still doesn’t recognize the text that appears on images. FLV files, such as YouTube videos also won’t be indexed because they don’t contain text.

As many Flash websites consist of images and other multimedia elements, the only text that Google finds on these websites might be “Loading”, “Please wait” or “Copyright”.

Google also cannot execute some JavaScript types. If your website loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google might not be able to find your Flash file.

In addition, Google cannot attach content from external sources that are loaded by Flash files. If your Flash page loads an HTML or XML file then these files will be treated as separate documents.

Why is Flash still a problem for search engines?

Flash content and regular HTML pages are fundamentally different. Just because Google can now index some text from Flash files doesn’t mean that Flash files are now search engine friendly. Here’s why:

It’s hard to divide the text into meaningful sections. Flash doesn’t use <h1> or <p> tags to separate different sections of text. It’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s not. Even worse, Flash designers often break down words into their individual letters to create “cool” text effects. That means that search engines cannot index these texts.
Usually, the complete content of a website is presented on the same URL. You cannot link to a special part of a Flash website. That means that it is also difficult for search engines to find the relevant section of the Flash site.

In addition, this means that Flash websites don’t get good inbound links to the right pages. Most Flash websites only get links to their home page.
The structure of Flash websites makes it difficult to get high rankings. Many Flash files are linked from other Flash files and no other websites link to these internal Flash elements. The lack of links from other websites makes it very difficult to get high rankings for these elements.
Flash doesn’t use the basic SEO methods. You won’t find proper link texts, headline tags or even properly optimized title tags in most Flash sites. That makes it very difficult to get good rankings.
Most Flash content is still not crawlable. As mentioned above, Google won’t index content in images and it has problems with JavaScript calls.

What can you do to improve your rankings if you have a Flash site?

If possible, avoid pure Flash websites and use Flash elements only when needed. If you must use Flash on your website, the following tips will help you to get better rankings:

Include the text and the links from the Flash file in an HTML version on the same page.
Use JavaScript and CSS to find out if the website visitor can parse Flash and then present the CSS DIVs that contain the corresponding content. Regular website users will see the Flash file, visitors who cannot parse Flash (for example search engines) will see the HTML version.
Use CSS and create a layer with your regular HTML content and then position another layer with the Flash content above the HTML layer so that your website visitors only see the Flash content.

Note that search engines might misinterpret this method as a spamming attempt.
Use different URLs for different sections of your website. Each set of content should have its own unique URL.

Flash has not been designed for search engines and it is extremely difficult to get high rankings with pure Flash sites. Using regular optimized web pages is the best way to get in Google’s top 10 results.

If you have a pure Flash website, you should make sure that your website has as many good inbound links as possible.

Warmly,

Gary Neame

USB flash drive, usb flash disk, customized OEM pen drives, thumb usb flash disk, CE/ROHS/FCC USB flash drive, Promotional usb flash drive

admin    CES     CE/ROHS/FCC, customized, disk, drive, drives, flash, Promotional, thumb

Established in 2005, Focus Electronics (H.K) ltd. Co. grows rapidly and now occupies an area over 1300 square meters for production base, we focus on manufacture and development of computer peripherals products and hot sale high-tech digital products, such as USB flash disk, MP3, Digital photo frame, PC-Pen, Mini laptops, and so on. To meet the requests of our customers, our products have passed CE, ROHS, FCC certificates.

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