The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Many of us rely on website analytics like those from HubSpot, Google Analytics and others to help us understand what keyword phrases are driving visitors to our websites. A recent change at Google is compromising that, at least by a little. If a user is logged into any Google account, Google will now use the secure version of the Google home page (the “SSL-enabled” version) to provide search results.A search done through the secure version of the Google home page protects the user’s search terms, which means your reporting tool can’t see the search term he or she used to find your website.

Google claims that this will affect less than 10% of searchers that find your website. That’s because many people are not logged into a Google account (Google AdWords, Google+, and so forth), and even for those people if they do a search outside of the Google homepage (like from a search box in their browser or on the Google toolbar) they don’t get redirected to the secure Google site for the search.

For those visitors who’ve been redirected to the secure version of Google, you can expect in your website analytics to see a new item in the list of search terms visitors have used: “unknown search” or “unknown keyword”.

So far, it looks as though Google is right: very few searches are being done through their secure website. It remains to be seen, whether that will change over time.

Interesting video from Google on the evolution of search, from Larry Page & Sergey Brin’s initial graduate project at Stanford to where it’s headed in the future.

Oh, No!!!

A sudden drop in Google rankings is terrifying if you rely on traffic from Google to bring in a significant portion of visitors to your site. When it happens, your traffic almost always takes a proportional hit. And that affects your revenue – very negatively.

What’s most terrifying about this is that you almost never know why it happened — and Google isn’t about to tell you. So how do you know what to fix?

As it turns out, Matt Cutts (The Google Guy) has answered that question in a video. He outlines some concrete steps you can follow to figure out what went wrong so you can fix it.

We hope it never happens to you, but if it does we think Matt’s suggestions will help.

Is SEO just another form of spam?

Sadly, we have heard prospective clients express the concern that all SEO is unethical, akin to spam. Those folks have heard that sentiment from others they trust, and that may be a hard opinion to displace.

Yes, Virginia, there IS ethical SEO

But the truth is that there definitely is ethical SEO, and that’s all the SEO we practice here at Rank Magic. We even have an entire page on our website devoted to it. Catherine Kozar at Affiliate Marketers College recently wrote about the subject and included a video from Matt Cutts, The Google Guy. that bears on the subject.

Catherine talks about the temptations to cut corners, to employ black hat SEO techniques, to write misleading titles and descriptions, to use hard sell hype pages that offers no real content, and so forth. All that is counterproductive in the long run, and Google expects those practices to become far less prevalent within the next five years as Matt Cutts explains that Google (and others) will filter them out of organic search results.

Check out Catherine’s post here.

When someone searches for your brand or company name, Google may display sitelinks.

What’s new is that Google has significantly increased the screen real estate devoted to them. Previously known casually as “six-packs” because they typically included two columns with three internal links each, sitelinks are now much more detailed and include links to many more internal pages on your website. Here’s how ours looks:

This gives visitors immediate access to deep pages on your website, helping them to get to the information they need. That’s great, because the easier it is for them to get what they want, the more likely they are to convert to paying customers.

Now, when you look at your own sitelinks (if you’re not already looking at them) you may find some pages there that you don’t think are helpful in the visitor-conversion process. You may have other pages on your website that you’d rather see show up there. Well, the good news is that you can actually influence what shows up in your sitelinks — at least partially.

Google allows you to “demote” a page that shows up in your sitelinks. When you do that, Google is less likely to show that page, and is likely to pick another page to show kin its place. (This isn’t 100% though … Google might still show your demoted page.)

How to Manage Your Sitelinks (sort of)

Go to your page in Google’s Webmaster Tools and select your website. Click on the plus sign next to Site configuration in the left column. From the drop-down, click Sitelinks. You’ll find there simple instructions and a form to allow you to “demote” a page, or make it less likely to appear in your sitelinks. By encouraging pages to show up that are more likely to appeal to your visitors, you’ll improve the likelihood of someone clicking to your site and clicking on the page most likely to convert them to a paying customer.

Google has more information on Sitelinks and demoting pages.

Back in 2008 in a post about best practices for URL structure, we alluded to our preference to separate words in URLs with dashes or hyphens instead of the very common;l used underscore. We wrote that underscores (www.domain.tld/red_widgets.htm) cause search engines to see the words in the page name as redwidgets, but if you use dashes (www.domain.tld/red-widgets.htm) the search engines recognize and index the two separate words, red and widgets.

Google has just released a video explaining the historical rationale for that, why it’s still true, and why it’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Watch the explanation by Google’s Matt Cutts.

For brick & mortar businesses and those that involve face to face customer contact, Google Places (and Yahoo Local and Bing Local) are important sources of traffic. These are the listings that show up next to a map of suitable matches.

Google Places is sporting a new look that also reflects changes in their approach. For example, there’s an increased emphasis on customer reviews. At the same time, Google will no longer re-post reviews from paces like Yelp as it did in the past. Instead, it will be emphasizing reviews from within Google Places itself — with two prominent red Write A Review buttons to encourage that. You can read more about this at Search Engine Land.

Citations are more important now than ever. Citations are mentions of a business, even if they don’t include a link. So in addition to the well-known positive effect of link popularity on your organic listings, non-linked citations can be especially helpful in your local listings.

A few months ago Google released a major algorithm update called the Farmer update or, more officially, the Panda update. (It’s named for it’s major contributor at Google, Navneet Panda.) Our clients have fared very well, but lots of websites have suffered dramatic rankings losses. We wrote about some approaches to deal with that back in May.

Recently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz released a video on how the Panda Up-date has changed SEO practices “forever”. While that may be overstating it, the video can be very helpful. Here’s a excerpt that we found particularly interesting.

Let’s talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect.

And don’t forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site.

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, “Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content.” Not enough. Sorry. It’s just not enough. … If you say, “Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is.” You think to yourself, “Hey, I have good unique content.” No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I’m like, “God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page.”

That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Not so much.

Matt Cutts says Google’s not a huge fan. He says that sites which publish articles from article repositories tend not to be the highest quality sites, and there’s always the risk of duplicate content issues. He says that he would tend to “lean away from it” in preference to developing great content that can attract legitimate links itself, and promoting it with social media.

See Matt discuss article marketing.

At Rank Magic, we sometimes help clients with article marketing if that’s what they want, but we usually recommend they place such articles on their own website first. Then we can apply social media exposure to the original article. Once that’s done, if the client still wants to see if article marketing can help, we can facilitate that.

The key, really, is having content with enough value that people will want to link to it. The social media promotion just helps make more people aware of that content on our client’s website.