First, why SEO over other marketing such as PPC?

Pay-per-click advertising is all very well, but it means you have to pay for every visitor. SEO is about getting free traffic from the search engines. Over the course of two years or more, nothing has a better return on investment than SEO. Thus, if you plan on having a website that runs for more than two years, search engine optimization should be a key part of your online marketing strategy.

So what is the worst SEO mistake that a company can make?

The most common mistake that organizations make with regard to SEO is bringing their SEO consultants into the process too late. Many companies fail to give SEO its due consideration during a website’s design phase.

So there you have it, from one of the godfathers of search engine marketing.

Brandt goes on to list several key aspects to a successful SEO campaign that need attention during the design process, or what we like to call “On Page SEO.” Some crucial SEO techniques your design might forget are:

• Search Engine Friendly URLS
  www.abc.com/your-keyword.html vs. www.abc.com/page1.html
• Text Based Navigation Links
• Use of CSS instead of Javascript or Flash

For more in depth info. on the why a SEO consultant should be contacted during a website’s design phase, check out the whole article or give us a call for an informative chat.

But as primarily a SEO firm, we’ve been steering clients away from flash based websites for years due to the fact that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN couldn’t index their content. By content, I mean written text, images, and of course links among other website elements.

It appears the Game is Changing Once Again

Google announced that it has made vast improvements in crawling and indexing flash based content from menus to entire sites:

“In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.”

- From the Official Google Blog

At present, Google is only able to index textual content in flash designs, but this is a vast improvement. More information on Google’s new functionality can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central.

Great, now I can have a beautiful flash based and rank it well too, right?

Not so fast. Hopefully this dream is not too distant in the future, but at present little is known about how effective conventional SEO strategies mesh with the new update to Google’s algorithm. Besides, without Yahoo! and MSN Live making similar announcements, website owners could be losing out as much as 30-40% of their search traffic.

Where to find relevant blogs?

• Simply Google the industry + “blog” For example, the term “fishing charter blog”
• BlogCatalog directory (there are many other directories). Browse or search
• Technorati Search your targeted keywords, and check out the top results

Add to the Conversation

Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better - it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.

How to Comment for Maximum SEO Effect

On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:

• Name
  The name attribute is what’s going to make up the written text of the link. It helps (greatly) in SEO to have keywords in this text because it tells search engines what the link target (your website) is all about. Now some bloggers won’t take kindly to the name “best Florida fishing guide.” That said, if you’re business name includes some of your target keywords, then it should be OK to use that name. To simplify, entering the name “Bob” doesn’t help much unless your trying to rank well for “Bob” in Google.
• URL/website/address
  Called by various names, but in all cases it is the target of the aforementioned link. Usually you want to include your home page, but it’s good practice to vary them a little bit, especially when you have a page that is relevant to the blog post at hand. Also, if you have other content rich pages that you’d like to rank well for a given term, include it here. An example of this is if you operate a guide service off of a particular island or offer an “overnight” charter option.

Wikipedia defines Link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”

Link baiting is all about creatin the buzz, and can take many forms, but in all cases involves content that is working talking about, and therefore worth referencing via hyperlink. There are four general types of link bait, but they can contain elements of any or all.

1. Linkworthy content
   A tutorial that is so concise, and so well written that it becomes the de facto manual on a given subject. It could be winter bass fishing in Lake Lanier or qualifications for a great P.R. firm. Example: Spousel Conversion Kit: Video to get your wife on board for buying that new boat.
2. Controversy
   An information peice that is so over the top, sometimes lacking all reason, that stirs up an online community or the blogoshpere at large. Something titled “President Bush Hates Puppies” is sure to draw a debate, and therefore generate links from people who agree and disagree.  Example: Polar Bear Future - Political or Scientific? Global warming, conservation, politics, and those cute, rip your arms off, white bears wrapped up in six words - who doesn’t want to read that?
3. Killer Apps
   A tool or application that is so useful, bloggers and webmasters will link to it to spread the word. It could be a tool for checking inbound links, or a lure color selector based upon weather and water conditions. Example: Georgia DoT Traffic Counts on Google Maps An easy way for retail/commercial realtors to look up traffic counts for a proposed shopping center.
4. Humor
   Everybody wants to share a joke, especially good ones. A collection of jokes, or one especially humorous one pertaining to your niche or industry is a sure way to draw links from related sites.  Example: Fishing Jokes Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day?

Search Engine Readable - What is it?

Search engines index your web page and everybody else’s by scanning the HTML code contained within it. They scan looking to determine the content and context of the page, and also consider relevant HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, em, strong, etc.).

Search Engine Readable - What’s left out?

Search engines do not, however, load images, CSS styles, and animation (including Flash). Text that is written in images, including navigation menus, are invible without using the “alt” tag, which by the way is a poor substitute.  This means anything written in these images or animations will not be indexed, and won’t influence your search engine rankings accordingly.

Examples: Good & Bad

Here’s an example of a full Flash site, loaded in a frame set. Notice how there are no written words to give search engines a clue as to what this page is about?

On the other hand, the following page offers lots of written text, links, and HTML tags:

See what the Search Engines see

To view what content the search engines can index, simply enter your web address in the following page address in the tool below.

http://www.willmaster.com/library/tools/What_Search_Engine_Spiders_See.php?dlperry