Adobe Flash Logos

There are many SEO tips out there for people doing flash, but sometimes all these tips still keep some people in the dark on how this is really implemented. Some people say Flash can now be read by search engines, and you should not worry about it. Some say just use swfObject, and others say use sIFR and you should be good. For me I am not going to recommend any specific tool or script framework. You can use what works best for you. I am just going to talk about the SEO issues of running a full Flash website and it’s corresponding solutions. And to explain this better I’ve created a Flash demo site that implements most of the concepts enumerated in this blog post. This may appear more like a tutorial than a blog post, so expect this to be a bit lengthly. I plan to make this a bit detailed because I get the same questions over and over again from SEO clients who we give consultations on how to fix their Flash issues and this blog post shall serve as a good reference our clients could always go back to. So I talk about the following:

1. Enumerate the SEO  issues with Adobe Flash.
2. Give the solutions to the SEO Flash issue.
3. And explain why our recommendation is a good solution to the Flash SEO problem.

Issue 1: A full Flash website is not an option?

Probably some SEO professionals have recommended this to you in the past. Just do not make the whole website in flash. Simply because you cannot optimize it in the same way you would optimize HTML. Although this statement is true, this does not mean just because a website is made all in Flash, it cannot be optimize to rank well for a keyword.

Recommendation: Our solution to doing SEO on complete full Flash websites

If Flash really helps in your website’s user experience and can help users in a way that helps in the overall selling/marketing of your products and services, then there is a good reason to keep Flash on your website.

Always note that doing SEO for a non-Flash website is easier to do, which translates to lesser working resources and just might also mean a lower price tag. Some SEO companies may not have any difference in pricing for Flash and non-Flash website, and this simply means their price is already adjusted to expect the worst or they are probably not aware yet of the SEO challenges of a Flash website.

The bottom line is, if Flash helps in making your customers happy or increasing sales, then keep it, otherwise remove it.  And if you do keep it, be prepared for the challenges in SEO.

Read more of the other issues below and as we continue, I will be referring to this full flash SEO demo page to explain all the concepts here.

Usability, Design & Development Considerations

Issue 2: Search Engines cannot Read Flash

The main root of it all why doing SEO for Flash is done differently is because search engines cannot read .swf Flash files. In the past, both Google and Adobe has continuously mention they are getting better and better in reading content and links within Flash, and they are working closely making sure .swf files’ content can be read and is crawlable and will be willing to open the same doors to other search engines in the future.

Google seems to be leading in it’s power to read .swf Flash files and Yahoo is still on it’s way, but still there are reasons to not rely on this capability.

• Google seems to be inconsistent in how it treats .swf files.
• If text within flash is converted into a symbol to have changes in size or other properties and not just position, this text is converted into a vector format no longer recognized as text.
• Yahoo is still working on their reading/crawling of Flash files and others are not capable yet. Better take advantage of doing proper SEO Flash practices today to get the competitive advantage while it is going to take some time for other search engines to follow. Once this is working properly on Yahoo, we should expect Bing to follow soon since Microsoft does own Yahoo.
• Content within Flash cannot be optimized in the same way you would optimize content for HTML.
• Based on Bing Webmaster Guidelines, if MSNBot cannot see any content to use as a Title or Description on a Flash website, it may get content from pages with incoming links going to your Flash website. This is not always a good thing since websites can also link to you with offensive, denigrating content. It’s better that you control what the title and description is than let Bing decide pull from another website we may or may not have control of.

Recommendation: Our solution to search engine readability of Adobe Flash content

To be able to cater to all other search engines is to not rely of the search engine’s power to read within the .swf file and just serve the content of the .swf file as plain HTML text.

Check our example SEO Flash Demo homepage, you should load this perfectly fine as a complete Flash site. Since this is only for example purposes, the example site is a very simple full Flash website. The Flash embed code is loaded by the web browser using JavaScript’s innerHTML property. This makes the page appear as if there is no Flash at all. And just behind the Flash where the innerHTML values are replace, this is were the text content of the Flash is added.

Flash loading is triggered by JavaScript in an external file. And search engines will not execute JavaScript which loads the Flash and will just see the content behind it.

This sounds like cloaking, it is cloaking? Isn’t cloaking bad for SEO?

Cloaking is showing search engines something and human visitors something else. This method somewhat does that, since search engines see a non-Flash version and users see a Flash version of the website. Although the content is EXACTLY the same, and this is the most important rule to follow when dealing with “cloaking-like” methods. Besides, this method of showing something else by using JavaScript is more widely accepted as a general practice. Google’ Website Optimizer does it, sIFR does it.

Other methods that have been abused for blackhat cloaking are user-agent cloaking, IP delivery and reverse/forward DNS detection where these type of methods are not recommended for our purposes.

In the screenshot below is my example SEO Flash implementation demo.

Homepage of swfSEO demo with and without JavaScript and CSS enabled

Usability, Design & Development Considerations

Issue 3: Links are not crawlable in Flash

Google has been showing more and more proof over the years that it can crawl links within Flash files, but then again Google is not the only search engine. And even if Google can indeed crawl links in Flash files, sometimes the navigational elements within a Flash file does not link to a new page with it’s own URL. They are simply links that do certain behaviors within the Flash file, like opening up a text file, or making shifts in the timeline, so even if Google can see the link, it will probably disregard it unless it is linked to a absolute URL going to another webpage.

Recommendation: Our solution to making Adobe Flash crawlable by search engines

Within the plain text version of the Flash that loads behind it, Flash navigation should also have it’s plain text navigation equivalent within the content. This way when crawled by search engines it will be accessed on it’s own URL which will still load the same Flash file but with different Flash default options).

Products Page of swfSEO demo with and without JavaScript and CSS enabled

Usability, Design & Development Considerations

Issue 4: Creating a Non-Flash Version to Compliment the Flash Version

There are several SEO professionals who I know that simply recommends to create a separate page outside of Flash that will serve as organic SEO landing pages. This does solve the issues of Flash not being readable or crawlable by some search engines but this give’s rise to other issues and here are a few bullet points why this would not be an ideal solution.

• When the non-Flash pages start ranking, this drives visitors to the non-Flash version of the website. If the Flash is really needed which makes a better sale because of the user experience, then this does not help improve that situation. Although you can always devise a way to eventually lead the user to the Flash site after they land on the non-Flash version, this adds an extra step in the conversion process which is something we want to avoid and just lead people to the main conversion page or form.
• Doing a 301 redirect on the non-Flash version to the Flash version will not help since 301s are only allowed when the redirect happens first in the loading of the page. So if this is done on the non-Flash version, Google will not even see the rest of the content since the first thing that happens is the redirect. A pause can be added using a Meta Refresh tag or a JavaScript window.location type of redirect so Google would have time to read the code on the page, but these types of redirects would not pass any link popularity or Google PageRank value. This would only help aid the user to get to Flash website which could possibly convert better and have search engines read the content of the non-Flash page as well.
• But more importantly is there will be two pages that people could link to: The Flash version and the non-Flash version. Since the content will only be in the non-Flash version, the links on the Flash version will not help the non-Flash website to rank better. Some people may link to the non-Flash version because this is what they found online and some may link to the Flash version because this is what the user aesthetically likes. This spreads the important link popularity strength and not helping out in the ranking.

Recommendation: Our solution – No separate Flash and non-Flash website. Just use 1 website that can serve as both

Use the solutions mentioned above that puts together the Flash version and non-Flash version together. People that desire to link to the website will be linking to the same URL, thus helping in the ranking of the Flash website.

Issue 5: Using # in URLs

Why is the pound/hash/sharp/number sign (#) used in URLs?

#’s were first intended to be on page anchor links. These are special tags with names that you can refer a link to. Linking to these anchors will make the page scroll down or up going to the set location of the tag and not load a new page.

A common problem with Flash and Ajax, if someone wishes to link to a page or bookmark it, they may not be bookmarking the right content. Many Flash and Ajax websites behaves in a way that there are no page reloads with different URLs, thus if someone clicks on a link and the page and content changes, the URL does not. This causes the problem where users would want to link or bookmark a specific content page on a Flash or Ajax website and they end up linking to the homepage. By using # in URLs, variables can be passed around in Flash and Ajax websites where different URLs will be created but the page will not reload as long as the changes in the URL are after the # sign. Thus users can now deep link to specific content within Flash files or Ajax website.

The SEO issue of using # signs in URLs.

The # sign in URLs are read by web browsers and not by server side scripting languages like PHP, ASP/.Net, JSP, Cold Fusion, Perl and more. The same languages that are used by search engine crawlers. Thus search engines actually disregard anything that comes after the # symbol. Even if a website gains so many links from various hash tags in the URL, from a search engine point of view, all these links may all be going to the same place and not deep linking. There is also a possibility then that links may have various keyword focus diluting the main focus of a page.

Currently to date, only Google has been experimenting on reading content from # URLs using what they call a headless browser which is still in experimental stage. A headless browser is

simply a web browser with all feature of a web browser but has no visual interface. It works and behaves like a web browser thus it can display data from # URLs. This is still not running on the main Google server and so far only Google has publicly stated this initiative in trying to interpret # URLs properly.

Current day search engines will treat all # URLs as if the # and the characters after it do not exist.

Recommendation: Our solution to the # URL SEO issue.

1. First is do not recommend the # URL.
   Recommend a real valid search engine friendly URL not using #’s. Somewhere on the page, cues like “link to this page”, “bookmark this”, “send to a friend”, or any type of link going to social bookmarking websites should be using the direct link URL without the #. This way any type of natural link building where people would simply link to you because they want to would give you the maximum deep link benefit. Although not full integrated in my example demo page and probably it is not the best way to do it, I just wanted to show it is possible. Try clicking on some links on swfSEO and see the direct link recommendation.
   

   What Google Maps does to recommend the direct URL. It has it's own "Send" and "Link" buttons that when you click on them, the direct URL link is created for the user.

2. Do not reload the page on a new URL all time.
   This defeats the purpose of using Flash. Where one of the benefits is not to reload the page for a better user experience. Even if there are direct links to every Flash “page,” this does not need to be loaded on every link so users are not turned off by the reloading experience. Search engines will not be experiencing this since they will be crawling the actual HTML links.
3. Still use the # URLs just in case users do not use the direct link recommendations.
   This sounds counter productive and against everything we have talked about but you cannot really control a user visiting your website. They will do what they want and if they decide not to follow your recommended direct URL, they will simply copy the URL and paste it. And when this is done, this is what is actually happening:
   1. Search engines will view it as if the link going to this URL has no # at all.
   2. People will see the proper content then they click on the link going to a # URL. If the link popularity metrics were not passed on to the proper deep link, at least it is still passed on to some other place that is part of the website. Better than no link at all.
   3. Redirect # URLs to their proper direct link. When # URLs are detected, use the JavaScript property document.location.hash to parse the # URL. This redirect would not be possible as a 301 redirect. The redirect will pass no link popularity metrics, but at least people that may decide to report the link TO some place else and copy and paste the URL, they will from now on, use the correct non-hash URL.

Yahoo’s Dynamic # URL updating: In the video above, see how Yahoo Maps updates the # URL right after dragging or resizing a map.

Usability, Design & Development Considerations

A special tool that can be used for parsing # URLs is swfaddress, this should make design and development easier using this script. Not only will this help designers/developers get the job done easier, this script also fixes the forward and back button of web browsers which is a usability issue in many Flash and Ajax websites.

*At current blog press time, the demo URL has not yet implemented swfaddress on swfSEO. This will soon follow shortly.

Issue 6: Using Only 1 URL

This problem was already discussed above under Issue 4 when having a non-Flash versions website, and also in Issue 5 when using hash and non-hash URLs. By now you should already know this is not a good thing to do and it is best to consolidate link popularity and PageRank to single URLs and avoid making people link to two or more different pages. The only reason I am stating this as a separate issue is I have seen some implementations adding in the URL a boolean flag turning Flash on or off.

http://www.example.com/path/file.php?var=val&Flash=on

or

http://www.example.com/path/file.php?var=val&Flash=off

Please bear in mind, any 2 URLs that are different in any way and has the same content causes a duplicate content issue which may harm sometimes in search engine ranking. And again this may cause problems of people linking again to 2 or more different URLs.

Recommendation: Our solution to one or more URLs

The solution is simple. Do not use 2 different URLs. Do not have a separate non-Flash website as discussed in Issue 4. Aside from # URLs, create direct links going to the pages as recommended in Issue 5. As long as there is 1 URL with the plain text content behind the Flash runs properly as discussed in Issues 2 & 3, there should not be a problem.

Issue 7: swf Files getting indexed

Not all .swf Flash files look good in search engine results.

Since Google can now look into Flash .swf files, there is a tendency that these .swf files can also get indexed. And sometimes the title and description in search results will not be looking good at all. Although Google has expressed in their updates that it is getting better, there is still a potential for it to not look that good.

Here are a few examples. The first and third search result, the title and description snippet looks normal, but in the middle one, the letters look spaced out:

Search query with spaced out characters.

Another one with spaced out titles and descriptions.

Flash Search Query

These titles and descriptions may not really matter, I can still imagine people clicking on these links even if the letters are spaced out. But something like this below might decrease clickthrough rates.

Flash files that get indexed with no description.

Although this may really be a problem with the Flash Designer/Developer. And we should not risk this opportunity to do better not only in ranking but in increasing clickthroughs from search engine results by having more compelling, more inviting titles and descriptions.

Traffic to .swf files might have an incomplete site

When Flash .swf files get indexed, and people click to visit the file, since these were intended to be included with an HTML file, sometimes the experience can be different. In the search results above… I actually tried some of the link and I enjoyed playing Ruffus Snowboarding and felt I was better than Shawn White.

Flash file with no other links going anywhere. Click to play the game. I liked it!

This game actually works, but you get stuck on this site and has no other navigation going to the other parts of the Disney website.

Recommendation: Our solution to .swf Flash files indexed with bad SERP title and description and incomplete pages indexed due to .swf files.

The recommendation is simple. If you have optimized your Flash website properly, then there is no reason to get your flash files indexed. And if you are confident that you have done all optimization possible, then you can simply exclude Adobe Flash .swf files from robots.txt.

If ever some .swf files already get indexed and you have no intention for them to be indexed, then 301 redirect this .swf file to the proper HTML file that embeds this file.

Design & Development Considerations

It would be more convenient to save all .swf files all in one folder. This makes it easier to block them all by simply blocking the folder in robots.txt. Also make sure directory files without an index file is not allowed to be displayed or simply add a blank index file if needed with a 404 http status header.

Issue 8: I am using sIFR, am I already optimized for SEO?

If you are aware what sIFR is, you probably already know the answer to this question. But if you are not aware of what sIFR does, you have probably heard it from somewhere that sIFR is good for SEO and is not really sure that this is for. The acronym really means Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. Although his blog post is not about sIFR, all information on sIFR can be found from the original source. And all you need to know is sIFR is used for making graphical text headings only and not for running complete full Flash websites.

So people that use this are more interested in coming up with good looking text that is still interpreted as plain text by search engines and not really interested in creating complex Flash animations. sIFR is not a complete full Flash website SEO solution.

Design & Development Considerations

• sIFR Alternatives
  If your main concern is not about making SEO friendly full Flash websites and is to simply come up with good looking text, sIFR is not the only option. You might want to also look into CSS Image Replacement, FLIR, TypeFace.js, & cufon.
• Use only for headers
  All of these text replacement scripts are still programming scripts that use some amount of processing resources. They run really fast and you should not have any problems running these, but using them on complete whole paragraphs, the whole content of the page, you will see a significant decrease in load time. Thus this is ideal to use only for headers and subheaders on a page.

Issue 9: I am using swfObject, am I already optimized for SEO?

swfObject, previously called Flash Object is simply a method of embedding Flash files in HTML documents by using JavaScript. Thus swfObject can be used in all the issues I have discussed above.

Just because you use swfObject does not make a Flash website SEO friendly, you will still have to review all the issues mentioned above and do the appropriate solutions to these issues.

You do not necessarily need to use swfObject. swfObject is nice with good simple JavaScript code for embedding Flash files in webpages, although the latest versions of Flash has a similar JavaScript function to embed Flash files. The function named: AC_FL_RunContent is generated automatically by Flash right after you publish a Flash file.

Design & Development Considerations

The use of swfObject is totally optional, if you decide not to use it, you can stick with Flash’s AC_FL_RunContent function and externalize it as a separate JavaScript file. In my example demo Flash SEO website swfSEO, my implementation used neither of the two. It was simply using JavaScript and doing a document.write to generate the non-JavaScript embed code version and using JavaScript’s innerHTML to display of the webpage. The only reason why I prefer to do it this way, the code looks more cleaner, no additional <script> tag in the main content and are all in external files within the <head> section.

The Summary

• Full complete Flash websites can be optimized for SEO purposes. As long as it is done correctly.
• Have content as plain text. Google can read Flash files, Yahoo is working on it an Bing can pull content from pages linking to your webpage using Flash. Everything is not consistent and not yet perfect. Have the exact same content in the Flash file as plain HTML behind the Flash will ensure all content is indexable by search engines.
• Use links in plain text. Even if Google can see links within Flash files, not all Flash navigation ends up in a new page. And Google is not the only search engine in the world. Have plain HTML pages and links in them that reflect the same content in the Flash file.
• It is better to consolidate both plain text content with the Flash version on a single page, than create a separate non-Flash website since this spreads link popularity metrics.
• Hash (#) URLs are good to use in Flash for deep linking, but remember search engines will consider the URL as if there is no # in it. Thus plain text links should be using valid search engine friendly URLs.
• You can block .swf files in robots.txt if all your optimization is done properly. It is easier to optimize an HTML file than a .swf file.

If you are not from the search marketing industry, you already know that rankings fluctuate. They change over time and this is were SEO companies use ranking reports checking how rankings change over time, looking at the trend and seeing the benefits of these ranking improvements in terms of traffic, conversions and ROI. Knowing that ranking change all the time due to different factors such as personalization, geographic location, all sorts of Google One-Box algorithms, Google Subscribed Links, Image Search, Video Search, Real Time Search, the search engine results page (SERP) may always look different from two different people. So I decided to check last Google commercial that was aired during the Super Bowl. This is actually not a new commercial, it was uploaded by Google online on YouTube last November 19, 2009 and many people in the search industry already knew about this commercial. A full set of all their other video commercials can be found on YouTube’s Search Stories.

I took a deeper look into the search results and replicated each search query to see how these results were different from the actual results below:

Google Results for: Study Abroad in Paris France

Google Super Bowl Ad Search Query: Study Abroad in Paris France

Results here not not much different, the top 3 sites were still the same, the differences were in indented results. Since StudyAbroad.com had 2 more indented listings, it occupied the top 3 spots. See results below:

My Google Results for: Study Abroad in Paris France

Google Results for: Cafes near the Louve

Now the next query is interesting, only 1 site is similar:

Google Super Bowl Ad Results: Cafes near the Louve

My Google Results for: Cafes near the Louve

And with the wrong spelling, after clicking on the Did you mean link, local one-box results also differ. And this is an interesting one, not a single one is the same.

Search Query: Cafes near the Louvre Paris France - Google Super Bowl Ad

Search Query: Cafes near the Louvre Paris France - Actual Google Search Results

Does this mean a lot are involved in doing Local SEO these days? Or even International SEO?

Google Results for: Impress a French girl

Google Super Bowl Ad: Impress a French girl - Search Query

Google Actual Results: Impress a French girl - Search Query

Amazing how Google answers still ranks well after the site has been closed already for 2 or 3 years I think.

Google Results for: Chocolate Shops Paris France

SuperBowl Ad - Google Results for: Chocolate Shops Paris France

My Google Results for: Chocolate Shops Paris France

You don’t need a website to rank well in Local search results in Google one-box. The number 1 in one-box is still hanging in there strong.

Google Results for: What Are Truffles?

Google Superbowl Commercial Ad: What Are Truffles?

Google Actual SERPs: What Are Truffles?

Interesting Yahoo answers results. It does not look like site links, and it does not look like the free flowing real time search. But it sure does consume a lot of screen real estate. Even more interesting is Google suggest today can show definitions in the drop down.

Google Super Bowl Ad Showing no Google Suggest Results

Actual Google Suggest Drop Down also Showing Definitions

I omitted other results from the Google Super Bowl ad since they did not show any large difference in search results. And here is the last one I will show, again local search differences. But not in one box, but in Google Maps.

Google Results for: Churches in Paris

Churches in Paris - Google Maps, Local Search Results in Google Super Bowl Video Commercial

Churches in Paris - Google Maps, Local Search Results in Google

Ok, no big deal, search results are always changing anyway. So many factors involved also that can change the SERPs. And for reference purposes, I am in San Diego California and the actual results above are what appears when you are in my location.

But, let’s now take a look at Bing’s TV Commercial…

Like what I did above, I took screenshots of the Bing video ad and did the actual search queries also. Here are the results:

Bing Results for: restaurants

Bing TV Commercial - Dim Lighting Option

After searching for restaurants, you will really see no “Atmosphere” drill down category until you click on: “Local Listings for Restaurants” on the side bar, which I clicked on and came up with this:

Bing Results Showing No Atmosphere Option: Dim Lighting

Ok, the paramerters are not exactly the same. Clearly, Bing had some Geo-IP detection and automatically modified the query to: restaurants San Diego, California. So let’s change it to make the parameters the same.

Bing Results for: restaurants in Portland, Oregon

Bing Video Ad: Search Query of Restaurants in Portland, Oregon

Bing Actual Results for Query: restaurants in Portland, Oregon

And I went to the atmosphere sidebar, and didn’t find the Dim Lighting option. Even after clicking on the more link.

Bing Actual Results: Restaurants in Portland, Oregon - Atmosphere has no Dim Lighting option

So is the Bing video advertisement shown on TV really fabricated for the television commercial purpose only? I’ll let you decide on that and you can check out the decision engine yourself. What do you think?

301 redirects and other types of URL webpage redirection.

Why SEO Professionals Seems Obsessed with 301 Redirects?

Minimizing Duplicate Content

It is common in many web design and development projects to have some cases of duplicate content. Although many people say this is a negative search engine ranking factor and some view it like a penalty, Google claims there is no penalty as explained by Google Engineer on Search Quality, Greg Grothaus.

Although a penalty or not, Google is aware of the duplicate pages and attempts to choose the best page and this is where it can make mistakes. Google tries to add diversity to the SERPs so they do not appear to be posting the same page over and over which makes a better search user experience. And in this process, the page you may be attempting to optimize and rank well might be filtered out and replaced with another page with duplicate or highly similar content. Come to think of it, this is ideal for the searcher since this filters out many spammy type of blogs also called splogs for spam blogs. But this problem can also exist internally. And this is where the 301 redirect is used. A 301 redirect means a permanent redirect which helps guide search engines consolidate cases of duplicate content.

Consolidating Link Popularity and PageRank

Links as you have probably heard over and over, help in SEO. Links are like votes of authority, votes of trust, votes of credibility. And the more links you have, the better it helps in ranking in search engines, although it is not only about quantity, but quality where links should be relevant and not spammy.

If a link goes to a page that redirects, a 301 redirect is the only type of redirect that will pass on the link metrics to the destination page. If not the proper redirect was in place, you can be passing precious link juice to another page that would have been beneficial to the destination page loosing this ranking boost benefit.

Some URLs change, but the content still generally remains the same

On old websites, even new ones, URLs may change. It could be due to a website redesign, or a discontinues product or service, a abolished department, a change in product description or whatever case that makes some old URL disappear. Using a 301 redirect will fix problems of missing pages that used to exist. There are mainly two benefits here:

1. Link Popularity metrics are transfered over to the destination page.
   If ever the old URL may have gained some links you may or may not be aware of that helps in the ranking of a missing page will be passed over to the new equivalent page if a 301 redirect is in place.
2. The user experience of not getting lost on your website.
   Visiting a page that no longer exist, either because you clicked on a link on another website, or from a search engine or was saved in your bookmarks can sometimes cause frustrations and this may make or break a  possible sale or lead online. Redirecting users to the right place helps avoid possible lost traffic.

Now just because you have to do a redirect and telling this to your web designer, web developer, network administrator, company IT guy may not be sufficient enough if they are not that familiar of the types of redirects and why it would be ideal to do a 301 redirect. Read more on the different types of redirects below.

The Types of URL Redirects for Web Pages

Meta Refresh Redirect

The Meta refresh redirect uses an HTML tag that refreshes or reloads a page. This generally works when placed in any part of the HTML source code, but ideally this should be in the <head> section. And the syntax looks like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;URL=http://www.example.com/path/file.html">

You can basically place any URL above. And the number “1″ signifies the number of seconds before the redirect will occur. With the controllable number of seconds, this type of redirect is ideal to use for functions that need a pause before redirecting. But is not ideal for SEO since search engines normally disregard this tag.

JavaScript Redirect

This does not have a similar implementation and code syntax to the Meta Refresh tag, but they behave similarly where the Meta refresh tag and the JavaScript redirect happens on the client side, meaning at the web browser level.

<script type="text/javascript">
window.location = "http://www.example.com/path/file.html"
</script>

This can also be placed anywhere within the HTML source code and is probably used more than the Meta Refresh tag for programming function delays since in JavaScript you can use a lot more other scripting functions incorporating the window.location function. Although again, this is not ideal for SEO since search engines normally disregard JavaScript code. It was only in the recent years that Google has considered reading JavaScript and has talked about it’s Headless Browser technology incorporated in Googlebot’s web crawling but is still in its early stages.

Google Headless Browser Content Crawling Diagram

302 Redirect

The 302 Redirect is also called a temporary redirect. This was meant to be used by network administrators to divert traffic to another URL possibly on another server when something was wrong with the main server. Down due to maintenance, file corruption, high traffic and server load, etc. So to avoid loosing traffic from your potential target audience, a 302 redirect can be used to handle the problem but once the problem is fixed, the 302 should be removed and brought back to the original URL.

Since this was meant to be temporary, search engines considered it temporary. Meaning if URLa 302 redirects to URLb, then search engines will look at URLb for the current content on the page to be indexed and crawled. But will take note that the final URL is still URLa. This cause a split also of the link juice passed to two URLs instead of one diminishing it’s power.

Depending on your server setup, 302 redirects can be done on the webserver (IIS, or Apache, etc.), on web server directives (Apache’s .htaccess file), on 3rd party redirect configuration tools, or on server side scripting languages (PHP, ASP, .Net, JSP, Cold Fusion, Perl, etc.)

301 Redirect

The 301 Redirect is also called the permanent redirect. It is configured and also behaves in the exact same way as a 302 redirect except this was meant to be permanent. Thus in the eyes of search engines, if URLa 301 redirects to URLb, then search engines will look at URLb for the current content on the page to be indexed and crawled. But will take note that the final URL is also URLb. This consolidates link juice passed to two URLs all into URLb increasing it’s link juice power.

Are You Observing Something Else?

Some of you may have observed something else that is in conflict with what was discussed above. And many people have reported cases where URLa redirects to URLb and URLa is blank but the content of URLb is seen by Google but the results page shows URLa even if a 301 redirect was NOT used. And either a 302 redirect or JavaScript redirect or Meta Refresh tag was used. Even I personally has experienced this and this usually happens when these redirects are really old. I have experienced this on some sites with 2 year old meta refresh redirects. So if Google seems to see a very old redirect, no matter how it redirects, they seem to be treated like a 301. But of course we would not want to wait for months or years for Google to see a redirect properly, might as well 301 redirect it.

Other Alternatives to 301 Redirection

There are other things that can be done to solve duplicate content issues without doing redirects like:

• Using consistent link URLs:
  You can control your links only, but not links of other people linking to you.
• Deleting other URL versions causing duplicate content:
  But sometimes this is not possible like in the non-www and www URLs, or the “/index.html” file and “/”
• Using the Link Rel Canonical tag:
  This should work fine. The search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing as expressed support for the tag, but I find quality control more difficult to do unless you have a tool that crawls reads the code for you. If not you have to manually check each file’s source code to make sure this was implemented properly. A 301 redirect is easier to check if they are done properly.
• Signing up on Google Webmaster Tools to fix the non-www and www URL duplicate content.
  This works also, but Google is not the only search engine in the world. Might as well come up with a solution for all engines.

If you are not sure if you need 301 redirects or has some redirects and is not sure what type of redirects are going on, tell us about it, so we can guide you further.

When analyzing a website for search engine “friendliness” it is always best to start with some kind of deep diagnostic analysis. There are some great free SEO tools out there. In my opinion, one of the best simple SEO tools is Hubspot’s Website Grader. Hubspot has made many updates to the tool over the years and it has been interesting to see where they place the most emphasis. The idea of course is to place focus on the key elements most important to the search engines and stay current with algorithmic updates.

Hubspot has reordered the tool’s results. All a user has to do is enter the domain URL and in a few seconds they will receive a full analysis including explanations of each result. The tool provides a grade between 0 and 100 based on the criteria it analyzes. The top of the report will show the grade with a basic explanation of what it means:

So let’s look at the first piece of criteria the tool places emphasis on.  Not surprisingly it is Content.  The tool talks about that fact that website content should have a good balance of quality and quantity.  The best way to earn high quality inbound links of course is to have compelling content that people can learn from, share, and link back to.  Four out of the five grading points focus on the blog (i.e. does the site have a blog, what kind of content does it have, what are the recent posts and have they earned links, etc).  The other two facors show the number of Googe indexed pages and the websites readability level.  A good website should have well-written content that is simple enough so that the target demographic can easily understand what they are reading. 

The next section of the tool is titled “Optimize” and focuses on many on page elements such as metadata, titles, headings, images, page analysis, and basic domain information.  One interesting update is that the tool removed results showing meta keywords.  The reason for this is most likely because Google has communicated that it no longer finds importance in meta keywords.  The focus is on page titles and descriptions which of course are the first and most important aspect of telling the user what the web page is all about.  Here is an example of the tool’s result in this section:

 The rest of the results in this section of the tool show basic page analysis from three pages selected by the tool, domain information like age and time to expiration, when Google last crawled the site, number of inbound links, and important directories the site is found in.  Inbound links pointing to a website is still the most important element to search engine relevance.  This is a quality game more than one of quantity.  The best strategy is to have a nice balance of links from varying relevant website with varying page ranks and content. 

The next section of the tool is called “Promote” and focuses on social book marketing and Twitter.  The tool assigns a Twitter grade based on the influence and usefulness that the Twitter account provides in the site’s marketing efforts.  Here is an example: 

 The last two sections of the tool are called “Convert” and “Analyze”.  The section titled Convert shows a brief summary about the site’s RSS feeds and conversion forms.  The goal of this analysis is to show the converting factors and how well optimized the site is for turning visitors into “customers”.

The Analyze section shows an overall summary of the results shown by the tool.  The tool provides a good foundation for understanding how compliant a site is with basic search engine optimization guidelines and fundamentals.  It is by no means a deep diagnostic analysis with feedback related specifically to an industry, but provides a solid benchmark in a matter of seconds.  

There are many exciting changes in the online marketing world coming in 2010 which will foster both new challenges and great opportunities.  More and more businesses will be using Internet marketing strategies in 2010 or will be increasing current online spending during 2010.  Companies that invested in online marketing last year are analyzing their results and making appropriate adjustments to those campaigns.  Businesses in all industries are continuing to realize that strategic online marketing is faster, more cost effective, measurable, and targetd. 

Many studies have been done over the recent months to assess how businesses will spend their online marketing budgets.  According to www.eMarketer.com, the majory of businesses surveyed will increase online budgets primarily in website design and development, email marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, and social media. 

Google also completed a survey with similar but slightly different results.  Some of these results were reported by B2BOnline.  Google asked b-to-b marketers where they will increase and decrease their marketing budgets this year and the responses showed:

• The top areas that will see increases are Website design and development (cited by 57% of respondents), search marketing (55%), webinars, podcasts and online events (50%), e-mail marketing (49%), social networks (47%) and blogs (44%).
• Areas that will see budget cuts include print advertising (51%), printed vertical directories (50%), direct mail (37%), outdoor (34%), TV advertising (31%), sponsorships (30%) and events (28%).

The results showing increases in website development most likely reflect companies that are revamping their website's appearance, performing conversion optimization to increase inbound marketing efforts and lead flow, and integrating Content Management Systems to make website maintenance easier and more cost effective. 

Our Vision for 2010

Internet Marketing Inc. is a full service interactive agency with a focus on cutting edge search engine optimization strategies and web design/conversion optimization/usability.  Internet Marketing Inc. continually monitors the pulse of the economy in order to better understand the business and financial goals of our clients that exist in all types of industries.  Our core goal is to increase online exposure and botton line profits for every client we service.  We design strategies that are specific to each client and align those efforts to achieve the client's core goals.  The company is backed by a strong management team highly educated in business, finance, law, and marketing. 

Most importantly, the company is driven by our outstanding team of professionals with decades of combined experience in website design, development, search engine optimization, paid search, social media, email, affiliate marketing, and mobile marketing.  With a focus on cutting edge search engine optimization, mobile search, and local search, Internet Marketing Inc. has redeveloped our SEO department under the leadership of our new SEO Director, Benj Arriola.  Benj has won multiple global SEO awards and designed SEO strategies for fortune 1000 clients.

The company has many new layers to ensure an even greater level of attention to detail, skillful project execution, and adherence to our specialized processes and procedures.  We are continuing great projects with brands like the US Army, Road Runner Sports, and Tropicana Las Vegas.  Between our San Diego, Las Vegas, and New York offices, Internet marketing Inc.'s growth from 2008 to 2009 was approximately 700%.  We look forward to a great year!

Brent Gleeson, CEO

2010 SEO Trends

There are many things  several SEO professionals are talking about on how SEO will be in 2010 where from one person to another, the priorities vary. I am not saying one person is more correct from the other, but SEO has always been a do and observe type of science and art and everyone will always have their own opinion about it. As long as you have an open mind to new ideas, backed up with your own testing by doing your own experiments, and continuously sharing with other SEO professionals, you will get a good pulse of what’s coming in 2010. As for me, this is what I believe will be coming in 2010, read more on the 2010 search trends below.

1. More Social Media Optimization in 2010

Probably by this time, many companies should already be aware that SMO is not just putting up a Facebook and Twitter account and adding as many friends as you can and your done. Social Media is really about the community. The building of the community and socializing, more interesting interactions and less hard selling. Social Media has served well when used as a medium for customer support, product and service feedback and has been less successful when used solely for new product or service promo offerings. It has also been a major problem with companies with bad testimonials and other negative reviews that tend to receive more attention and hurt the company than help them. Social Media’s role in SEO has been:

• Gaining links from social media sites
  Whether it is a blog, forum, daily status, micro blog, etc, as long as there was a link and it was search engine friendly, it was good.
• Gaining links from the community
  If you have link baitable content that is so good, the moment someone is interested in the topic reads it will link to it and promote it further. Social Media serves as a medium to promote your link baitable content even to more people maximizing the word-of-click promotion.
• Getting more pages on Page 1
  If your site already ranks well on page 1 but still has some competitors on the same page, your own social media profiles can potentially rank well for your targeted keywords also and possibly push down your competitors so you can dominate the first page. This technique has served well also for some people for ORM purposes to push down denigrating websites for branded search terms where denigrating sites can hurt the company’s brand.

In 2010, all of the above will still be true, but aside from the reasons above, Google has already implemented the Real Time Search, where in real time, news, microblogs and social media status are posted in SERP snippets.

2. Better Link Development in 2010

Link Diversity – We have heard this many times over and over in many conferences last year: link diversity. The funny thing is this is not a new SEO concept. But for some reason, the common link spammer will always exist and Google and all other search engines will always try to track them down and apply some filters to make the spammer’s efforts less successful if not successful at all. You can only link spam so much to appear natural with Google’s server and algorithmic powers. I have no doubt they can easily find link spammers just by looking at how diverse their backlink universe profile is. Strictly speaking, almost every kind of whitehat link building can be viewed in a blackhat point-of-view if you really want to view it that way. Adding diversity can always help in proving links to be more natural than artificial. Rand Fishkin speaks about this more below:

In the video above, link diversity in IP addresses and deep linking was discussed. But what I believe that was not discussed was also link diversity in website types where your links come from. For example, not only from blogs, or forums, but also articles, press releases, news, reviews, directories, and more. The more your links are only from 1 type of website, probably it s artificial. More on link diversity would also be diversity in link text and also link diversity in geographic location which can sometimes mean they are also coming form the same Class-C IP block.

First Link Priority – After verified over and over by various SEO professionals after this was first mentioned by Michael VanDeMar in 2007, order of links is important. In the case of duplicate links within the same page, only the first anchor link text is read by search search engines. And sometimes the first link may not have the best anchor text. A good tool to check your sites first links is the First Link Checker by BusinessOL. Knowing this search engine behavior is where the creative coding comes into play making sure the first link text of a duplicate link on a single page gets the best keyword focused link text. Although experiments show this is important, my gut feels is Google will get this fixed sooner or later simply because it makes no sense not to fix it. This was one of the main question I have asked to Matt Cutts in Google Moderator and hopefully it catches his attention.

3. On Page SEO Will Never Die

Coder skills are still a major requirement for 2010. A common thread in many SEO forums, is what is more important, offpage or onpage SEO? Of course these are two different things and some people tend to compare them based on their different experiences since one SEO ranking factor can always outmatch the other depending on the situation. But many SEO people believe in the power of the link is given more importance over what you place in your title tags, meta tags, header tags and so on. But what many people are not realizing is Onpage SEO is not just writing the write content within the proper tags, but coding websites properly as well.

Document Weight/Loading Time – Page Speed as Google calls it is an important ranking factor in 2010. Below are several useful resources about it:

• Page speed added in Google Webmaster Tools
• Page speed from the Google Blog
• Google page speed
• Page speed plugin for Firefox
• Page speed plugin for Chrome
• More on page speed from the Google Blog

Structured web using Microformats – Specific code that can help Google understand more details about the sections of your site creating rich SERP snippets. Several links about this is listed below:

• Introduction to rich snippets
• More on rich snippets
• Microformats
• Microformats and VCards/HCards
• Microformats and RDFa
• Google rich snippets tips and tricks
• XFN HCard compared to RDFa
• FOAF tags
• vCards Specifications
• XFN Specifications

Tags to signify location and language – proper doc types, language and also the use to the <address> tag are known to help out in local search and international search.

First link proximity – depending on your CSS skills, floating <div> boxes in the proper direction, controlling what comes first in the content and what still making the whole site cross-browser compatible will be a challenge for some companies.

Internet Marketing Inc. is proud to announce the addition of our newest team member, Benj Arriola.  We are starting off the new year with an advanced SEO department lead by Benj and his team.  Benj is one of the most respected SEO’s in the country, a multi SEO award winning expert, an experienced developer in HTML and CSS, and an accredited conference speaker. 

Some of his accomplishments include:

• Won 1st place in the 2007 SEO World Championship winning a brand new car besting SEO professionals from all over the world.
• Won 2nd place in the 2008 SEO Contest by UK Webmaster World and was beaten by a 30-man SEO team.
• Has worked on SEO campaigns of top brands like Sony PlayStation, AutoDesk, Sybase, Caterpillar, American Red Cross, American Council on Exercise, Hasbro, and more!

Benj will be directing the Internet Marketing Inc. SEO process and strategy as well as representing the company at many conferences this year.  Welcome Benj Arriola!

Here is a great video interview with Benj by Lon Safko of the Social Media Bible:

As most of us know, Google has formally launched “personalized search” in an effort to continually improve each individual’s search experience in their engine.  The goal is to track user’s search behavior in order to continaully improve and “personalze” the relevance of results.  When these discussions first began, many SEO’s and Internet marketing companies feared that this would mean the end of Search Engine Optimization as we know it.  We are still waiting to see what affect this will have over the coming months but from the information disseminated thus far, it seems that most of the fundamental best practices will still apply. 

So How Does this Impact SEO for Our Clients?

The truth is, some of the important areas of focus that these changes bring to light, have really always been important.  The end goal of SEO is to grow a business through relevant natural search traffic that leads to conversions (whatever those conversion goals might be).  You can chase rankings all day long but if the result is not good quality traffic and conversions that lead to growth, there is something missing.  The key things that still matter are:

• Focus on traffic and conversions more than rankings:  Of course, we are still always going to look at rankings but now more than ever, we really need to combine the focus on rankings and the resulting traffic.  If a site sees an increase in rankings but stagnant levels (or decreasing levels) of traffic, personalized search may be posing a negative effect and the strategy shoulf be adjusted.  On the other hand, if rankings see a slight dip but traffic is improving, the site might be experiencing better results from the shift to personalized search. 
• This has of course been important for a long time but there is a renewed focus on “brand” quality:  The quality, interactivity, value, and user experience of a website will always impact traffic, bounce rates, repeat visitors, and link popularity.  Google is now placing more emphasis on this with personalized search.  This can create challenges for new businesses that may not yet be a “trusted brand” yet.  However, it certainly does encourage any business to develop great content and have a good user experience. 
• Other sources of traffic might have a positive impact on natural search results:  It seems that all traffic sources will now be taken into account with Google’s personalized metrics.  This could mean that paid search traffic and other key drivers to a website might positively (but indirectly) impact natural results within the personalized search spectrum.  It will be interesting to see the results of this in the coming months.

How Should We Be Adjusting Our Strategy and Campaigns?

Best practices still apply.  As mentioned above, we must conitue to improve user experience, brand loyalty, content, and traffic (from all sources).  Continue to follow best pratices for basic SEO coding and making all pages accessible to the search engines, use a keyword strategy relavent to your business goals and that is aligned with your user’s search behavior, continually develop good content, and earn great inbound links by being proactive in your industry.

A week ago ended the last SES Chicago scheduled to occur in December as it will move to October 18 in 2010.

Although mid December is not technically Winter it was wintry enough especially compared to a much more Fall like mid October date starting next year.

The 2009 SES Chicago started on December 7th with a dusting of snow outside as Jeff Jarvis kicked it off with his interesting keynote on the link economy being part of the greater Google economy the online space is currently in.

The sessions that followed had a predominant SEO theme versus the growing social media focus of Pubcon & SMX conferences in my opinion.

Although the Google Real Time Search did evolve into a hot topic near the closing of SES as Rae Hoffman was furiously writing a great post in the speaker lounge on the real time search spamming potential.

I was particularly surprised there wasn’t much focus to online mobile marketing, beyond one session, which is sure to be a greater focus in all of the major Internet Marketing conferences in 2010.

Matt McGowan & Mike Grehan were generous enough to have me speak on a site clinic with Tony Wright & Elisabeth Osmeloski before I had to quickly take the shuttle through the snow to Midway Airway where my flight back to San Diego encountered chronic delays.

The wet snow & flight delays at this recent SES Chicago will be a distant memory when SES comes back to the United States here in San Diego February 2010.

Also this is my last post here on the Internet Marketing Inc Blog as I will be joining Resource Nation as the SEO Director there going into 2010 but be sure to check back here for the latest Internet Marketing news as well on Android at my personal site GoogleAndBlog.

In case you didn’t know, we’re in tough economic times.  These economic conditions have drastically cut budgets across the nation and world, leaving meager allowances for marketing and advertising in its wake.

Nonetheless, expectations for 2010 remain optimistic.  In a new study released yesterday, StrongMail reveals nine out of ten business executives plan to maintain or increase their marketing budgets.  Execs aren’t thinking conventionally for the new decade either, instead the survey’s respondents indicated they were open to marketing strategies that utilize the Internet and maximize their dollar.  Next year, 69 and 59 percent of business executives anticipate increasing their email and social media marketing, respectively. Another 42 percent claimed they expect to spend more on search engine initiatives, such as SEO and PPC.  The survey’s results indicate a migration to internet marketing tactics, as advertising and direct mailing initiatives are expected by less than 30 percent of execs.

Furthermore, the study showed a desire among business executives to combine the tested and proven tactics of emailing potential customers with social media.  Execs did not, however, demonstrate uniform confidence about how they would go about implementing such strategies in the upcoming year.  Instead, one out of five executives claimed they had no idea where to begin.  With more businesses seeking to establish an online presence in hopes of finding cheaper alternatives to conventional advertising, it is certain that social media marketing and search engine initiatives will play integral roles in the year 2010.