With great predictability, Google’s recent announcement about improved Flash indexing was rapidly followed by numerous client requests for clarification:

“What does this mean for SEO?”

“Do we still have to include HTML text on our Flash pages?”

“What do I need to do differently?”

In response to these and other requests, we’ve compiled the following summary and recommendations to assist our clients (and blog readers) in determining the best course of action relative to Flash, Google and SEO.

Google’s Improved Ability to Index Flash – In a Nutshell:

• Adobe recently developed an optimized Flash player for search engines to use and is collaborating with Google and Yahoo on implementation.
• This means Google can now explore Flash more like a website visitor does.
• This new technology only covers text and links, which is a small part of most Flash content.

Recent Updates Regarding JavaScript:

• Initially, Flash triggered by JavaScript was not going to be indexed because search engine robots typically do not execute JavaScript code (Google’s June 30th announcement).
• However, a recent update to the official Google announcement (circa mid-July) indicates an update has been rolled out to enable support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• This means that Flash triggered by JavaScript now has the potential to be crawled.

What Has NOT Changed:

• Images, videos, animations and graphic text in Flash are still NOT indexable.
• This change also does not yet take into account any Meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file.

Flash and SEO Best Practices are STILL Recommended:

• Even considering this announcement, SEO best practices prevail because the amount of text on a page (or in a Flash file) still contributes heavily to the relevance and value search engines ascribe to a page or file.
• In fact, the amount and type of relevant, indexable content on a page is even more important now. The greater the competition, the greater the need for relevance.
• It is still a best practice to follow the “tried and true” Top 3 SEO Strategies for ensuring pages containing Flash are search-engine friendly and accessible (see the “Additional Information” below for more detail).
• These best practice recommendations are based on the fundamental difference between being indexed and ranking well in search results.
• Indexation does not mean improved rankings. A really snazzy site with very little indexable content, is still a really snazzy site with little indexable content, regardless of whether the Flash component can be crawled.

What Developers Should Do Differently with Flash Files:

• Separate URLs for each set of content within the Flash experience is still the best way to ensure content gets indexed (see the “Additional Information” below).
• Separate URLs also contribute to increased link popularity and the opportunity to create optimized Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for each page.
• Because search engines are able to see text within Flash files, any text that is not important to search results (e.g. copyright information, “loading” messages) should be replaced by images to avoid indexation.
• Google’s response to questions regarding the concern over duplicate content is:

Serving the same content in Flash and an alternate HTML version could cause us to find duplicate content. This won’t cause a penalty — we don’t lower a site in ranking because of duplicate content. Be aware, though, that search results will most likely only show one version, not both.

Timing for Implementation:

• Google has acknowledged that the impact of this improved capability will take time to fully propagate through search results.
• There is no word on timing for Yahoo implementation, but Adobe is working with Yahoo on next steps.
• Adobe has not yet made the technology available to MSN, possibly as a result of MSN’s production of the competing Silverlight product.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT FLASH AND SEO:

A) Top 3 SEO Strategies for Flash:

1. Same Page HTML: The simplest search-friendly approach.

Include important text and links from the Flash movie elsewhere on the same page, as plain HTML.

2. Progressive Enhancement: The best future-proofing approach

Using a CSS ‘DIV’ tag, the page developer would define a certain area of the page for this display. Then, using JavaScript, test for whether the Flash plugin is present and (by default) whether JavaScript is enabled. If they are, the Flash code is written to the page with JavaScript.

With this approach, if the visitor does not have either JavaScript or the Flash plugin (like search engines do not), plain HTML will display. Otherwise, the Flash will display. The idea is to make the page friendly to all types of devices. This approach can be extended to encompass text readers, mobile devices, etc., helping to build flexibility into your page coding approach.

Potential drawbacks: possible layout issues with old browsers when the text is very long.

See Bobby van der Sluis’ article for Adobe on developing Flash sites using progressive enhancement for more information.

3. CSS Layers: The third best approach.

This uses CSS to define two layers, one above the other, positioned in the same space on the page. The Flash element is placed in the top layer, while the text and links are placed in the lower layer, hidden by the Flash.

Potential drawbacks: possible display issues with older browsers; does not add the flexibility of a full progressive enhancement approach; a slight chance that this may be viewed as an attempt to ’spam’ search engines - however, using this method in a conservative manner is unlikely to cause any penalty.

B) The importance of having separate URLs for each phase of the Flash experience:

Excerpt below taken from the Search Engine Land post by Vanessa Fox:

…[T]he searcher experience is better served by Flash implementations that provide a unique URL for each set of content. Some Flash implementations dynamically load text as the user interacts with the application, but the URL remains the same. In this scenario, Googlebot can now follow those interactions (in a limited way) and if the URL doesn’t change, then all content that is dynamically loaded as the interactions progress is associated with a single URL.

…This means that if the content that is dynamically loaded into the Flash application from the fifth interaction matches a searcher query, that Flash application may be served in the search results. But when the searcher clicks over to that result, the content won’t be found on the page. The searcher will have to interact with the application until that content is loaded. Searchers may instead feel frustrated and abandon the page.

For the best user experience and higher conversion rates from search, Flash developers should be careful to avoid this situation by creating distinct URLs for each piece of content. This implementation helps the Flash site be more viral as well, as users can email, Digg, and otherwise share the content more easily.

Google acknowledges this scenario may not be an ideal searcher experience, but points out that other non-HTML file formats such as PDFs have the same limitations. When a searcher clicks through the Google search results to a PDF file, the content that matched the query may not be on the first page of that PDF and the searcher has to scroll through the file to find the desired content.

C) Further Reading about Google, Flash and SEO:

1. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog June 30 Announcement (now includes an update to the original announcement)
2. Summary and explanation of announcement from Search Engine Land by Vanessa Fox
3. Andy Beal’s post on Marketing Pilgrim cautioning against all-out Flash adoption
4. Erick Schonfeld’s post on TechCrunch includes a good point: “Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another”
5. Adobe Developers resource web site – clearly covers the use of the “Progressive Enhancement” approach

Breaking News! Persuasive Technology 2008, the Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, will take place in Oulu, Finland next June.

The 2007 version of this conference, aptly named Persuasive Technology 2007, was chaired by BJ Fogg and hosted at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab in April. This was Closed Loop Marketing’s first exposure to this community of industry experts and researchers and we were impressed. You can read a review of Persuasive 2007 here.

The mission of these international conferences on Persuasive Technology is to provide new insights into the ways video games, mobile phone applications and websites can be designed to motivate and influence people.

Next year’s conference, jointly organized by the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of Aalborg in Denmark, will also feature research themes on:

• Motivational technology
• Persuasive games
• Web 2.0
• Mobile persuasion
• Ethics of Persuasive Technology
• Business models for persuasive systems

Both universities have a long tradition in researching the human and social side of Information Technology. More recently, their focus has evolved to include Persuasive Technology. The University of Aalborg even offers the first full Master’s program dedicated to this subject.

Finland is often referred to as the “land of the thousand lakes” and becomes the “land of the midnight sun” in midsummer, complete with frequent sightings of the Northern Lights.

As it promises to build on the success of Persuasive Technology 2007, I’d recommend marking your calendars for June 4 - 6, 2008, as this will be a conference worth attending.

More details will be available during the coming months - and we’ll be sure to share them here on our blog. In the meantime, the most current source of information is located at the Persuasive 2008 site.

Want to increase traffic to an existing blog? Starting a new blog? With more than 120,000 blogs being created every day, you’ve got some heavy competition. Here are 8 important steps for increasing your blog traffic you don’t want to miss.

1. Validate that your feed displays clearly in major feed readers. Whether you’ve chosen to include full or partial content in your feeds, make sure your feed comes through clearly in major feed readers like Google Reader, Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, and Bloglines.
2. Confirm that your blog is indexed by major blog search engines. Conduct a search for your blog in search engines like Google Blog Search and Technorati. If you can’t find it, your potential readers can’t either.
3. Ping the major blog search engines after you’ve added a new post. If your blog platform has an automated pinging script, this isn’t a big concern for you.
   • However, if you’re working with a custom built platform, you’ll either have to add in the pinging script for each engine you want to ping (see Technorati’s automatic pinging script as an example) or manually ping them using a service like Pingomatic or Pingoat.
   • Google also offers a Blog Search Pinging Service API for bloggers who frequently update their blogs.
4. Add keywords to your URL, title, description and body copy. This should be standard practice for every blogger, but it’s worth mentioning because there are so many blogs that lack keyword focus. Even minor differences in keywords can translate into major traffic.
5. Consider guest blogging as a great way to raise visibility to your blog, especially if you can get invitations from high traffic, high ranking blogs. There are two possibilities for guest blogging:
   • Invite guest bloggers to write a post for your blog (with the hope they’ll link to the post from their site, bringing their readers and increased subscriptions for you) or
   • Write an article on their blog with a link back to yours.
6. Get your blog listed on other Blogrolls. This step will increase exposure to your blog as well as add some nice link juice from these other blog sites.
7. Update your blog with a new post at least once per week. Frequent posts will bring your readers back regularly and encourage them to add your feed to their reader.
   • Incidentally, one of the many ways Google Blog Search determines the popularity of a blog is by how many unique subscribers there are to the blog’s feed, which leads to the next point …
8. Make it easy for users to add your feed to their feed readers. If your feed doesn’t support autodiscovery, it should.
   • If you use Firefox, you can quickly check to see if your feed has autodiscovery enabled by looking for the feed icon in the far right of the URL in the browser window:

   

   • And if you don’t offer your readers an easy path to sign up for your blog’s feed, you should. Seriously, stop reading, do it now.
   • Consider that AddThis.com makes it easy and offers a “subscribe” button in addition to its popular “bookmark” button:

   

Of course, there are many other strategies you can use to increase your blog’s traffic. If you’re hungry for more, check out these great posts by Roger Gilliam, another CLM blogger: Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines and How to Optimize RSS and Atom Feeds for Wordpress.

If you’re taking the time to write a blog, it’s a good idea to make sure people can find it.

When you hear the word conference, what comes to mind?

If you’re an online marketing professional, likely you’ll think of Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World PubCon or ad:tech – and with good reason. Industry events such as these are heavily promoted, well funded and oft-cited in the blogosphere.

However, there’s another conference type that isn’t heavily promoted, isn’t usually well-funded and yet can provide one of the richest venues for seeing the cutting edge of research, participating in the generation of new ideas and building relationships between the too often disparate worlds of theory and application.

I’m talking about academic conferences.

Wait - aren’t those just for grad students and researchers?

Nope – or at least not the one I recently attended.

Chaired by BJ Fogg, head of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, the Persuasive Technology 2007 conference in Palo Alto, California brought together the world’s leading experts on creating computing products and interfaces to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.

Designed to give attendees "a stronger grasp of persuasion psychology (the big ideas) and new insights for designing video games, mobile phone apps, and web sites to motivate and influence people (the practical stuff)," this conference not only provided a venue for idea presentation, but also gave attendees the opportunity to participate in idea generation.

Through a unique conference format, each of the 40+ presenters had only 10 minutes to talk about their recent work and research. Naturally, 10 minutes to talk about subjects like using digital images to persuade viewers or the way peers influence others online doesn’t leave a lot of room for elaboration.

Fortunately, each speakers’ panel was followed by a question and answer session as well as a break in which all attendees could mingle together, ask questions, generate ideas and begin building relationships.

Unlike some industry conferences I’ve attended, Persuasive 2007 was deliberately kept small (less than 150 attendees) to facilitate a high level of interpersonal interaction. And what’s more, there was nearly a 50/50 split between industry and academic representatives, with a large percentage of attendees from international organizations.

And wow, what research.

Take Jeremy Bailenson’s work at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab on the implications of avatar representation for social influence. One of his team’s projects determined that people are more likely to vote for a presidential candidate that looks more like them than one who does not, without ever being aware of the similarity. Such research has significant implications for the alteration of facial images in the media, both online and offline.

(Read the full article…)

If you’ve ever presented the results of your SEO or SEM efforts to a client of yours then this scenario will be familiar:

You spend hours (or days) compiling the data. You conduct your analysis, create your graphs and package it up. It’s been a great month and you make sure to convey that in your email, though the charts speak for themselves. You send it off.

Questions like these are the ones that come back:

"What does this chart mean?"
"Why did our numbers go down here?"
"What caused this increase?"

Now, if you’re fortunate enough to have clients who actually read your reports, consider yourself lucky. An informed client is more likely to be a champion for you and your future efforts than one who never opens your attachments.

However, that also means you have a responsibility to anticipate your client’s questions and take the necessary steps to make your metrics meaningful.

How to do this? While there are many paths to the creation of meaning, below are 3 Must-Have Rules for any SEO or SEM report:

(Read the full article…)