In this article I will underline some of the reasons why you should consider blogging, and how it can improve your website’s rankings.

Adding a blog to your website can translate into the following results: increase your rankings, increase your traffic, bring credibility and attract links.

A blog is a great way to add more content relevant to your website’s main topic and increase the value and relevance of your website. The more relevant content you add, the more your site becomes an authority. And an authority site usually enjoys a higher page rank and improved search rankings.

Blogs are also great to increase the ranking potential on long tailed search phrases. Those are phrases that are less commonly searched, including three to four words, that are very targeted to your products or services.

Blogging is also a great way to improve your website’s traffic. An interesting and informational blog will get you repeat visitors. Even better, an interesting blog will benefit from word of mouth, as readers who liked your blog might likely pass your link to their friends

Establishing yourself as an expert on your website main topic is quite important for anyone who wishes to reach credibility for their products/services. Why is that important? Readers that acknowledge what your are blogging about are more likely to become customers. Sharing your knowledge will encourage your visitors to trust you and might lead to increased conversions.

A good, well written blog can result in free one way links to your site. Visitors that like your site can very easily add your link to their blog roll. And link by link, by link, you find yourself with a strong linking component which is quite important when it comes to search rankings.

All in all, if you want to grasp those extra conversions, try out a blog and see how it impacts your objectives.

Nevertheless, It is not my aim here to undermine Flash sites. I actually find that Flash sites great to present complex content as they allow for more content on a page without disturbing the page design. They are great to present slide shows or movies to clearly explain a product. And also, certain industries like the arts and entertainement that have a real need for multimedia, find in flash technology the perfect solution to expose their works.

So what can be done if you have a flash site, but wish to be well ranked in search engines position results?

A simple thing you can start doing is input metadata to your flash content. That includes titles, descriptions and keywords for your content. Even though meta tags are not as important as they used to be, crawlers will still read them, which will help the indexation of your flash content in search results.

Another thing that can be considered is to create distinct HTML pages to present each Flash page. This way, when a visitor requests a page, they will see Flash, but crawlers will read the HTML version.

Finally, you can build up quality backlinks to your Flash site. Backlinks are great to underline site relevancy. And for competitive queries, Google’s relevancy algorithms are all about linkage data. Take the case of La Maison du Chocolat, an entirely designed Flash site. But even though it is in Flash, when typing the keyword « chocolate », the most relevant keyword for a company dealing with chocolate, it ranks in Google’s front page result. How? When performing a backlink check on this site, I identified 466 links targeting it, and most of the originating sites of the links where relevant with chocolate (meaning that their content was primarly about chocolate related keywords). So if you have a Flash site promoting lets says footwear, you want to get as many quality links originating from sites that have content talking about this subject.

If you can’t bother to do all of the above, then you always have the paid advertising solution. Research and buy relevant keywords / expressions, and you’ll get to the top of Google’s front page search result.

So if your site is entirely Flash designed, you now know where to start to get those desired rankings to increase your visibility.