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.

What are article directories? These are websites where thousands of articles are posted. They are therefore generally large websites, making them attractive to search engine crawlers. Articles can be easily found by readers as they are categorized by subject. Articles are also linked together. So if a reader is checking an article about « SEO techniques », he will move from one article to another on that specific topic. These articles can also be exported to the readers own website (usually for free, but a small fee may apply).

How does your site benefit from article directory submissions? As the owner of an article, when submitting one, it will hold a bio with a link to your website. What this means is that someone who is searching online and comes across the article directory, will see a link to your website. Furthermore, if your article is exported by someone to their website, they are required to keep it exactly as it was found in the directory, meaning that your link can potentially show up in many websites. You do want that!

When submitting an article you need to do two things. You need to carefully choose your keywords. The right density of keywords is a key factor, and those need to appear naturally within the content. If done properly, crawlers will be drawn to your website, and expose your link. You also need to come up with unique and informative content. Submitting an article that is too similar to other published articles will not retain readers attention, who will in turn not find a use to include it in their website, or continue reading it. You also want your article to be helpful to the reader. Two reasons for this. If it is helpful, the reader will read the entire article, and reach your link at the bottom. You will also be viewed as an expert, which will give the reader a reason to visit your site, and grant greater marketing value to whatever you have to offer.

So on top of submitting your website in regular directories try submitting your articles and check how it will affect your traffic. Might want to try it…

Duplicate content is one of the biggest dangers for good SEO. Get it wrong, and pages identified with duplicate content in your web site might just end up in Google’s Sandbox. This is a dim and remote place where Google indexes domains that are never to be found. Well, you can always find a sandboxed page by typing its exact url in the search box. Not Good!

For those who don’t know it yet, duplicate content referes to substantive blocks of content in your domain that closely match other content. When a crawler visits your domain, it is programmed to detect differences in content. If it deems that certain pages are mostly identical in content, it will identify them as cases of duplicate content. There are two types of duplicate content: internal duplicate content, which is when search engines recognize very similar pages from one domain, and external, which is when multiple copies exist across multiple domains.

Why is this bad? Well the consequences can be pretty harmful from a SEO point of view. A page identified with duplicate content will not rank for any keyword, will not pass link reputation, and will not bring any page rank to any other page. Also, if you have the exact same content as other domains, search engines may not even display your page. The more sites have the same content, the lower are your chances of appearing in search results. Again, not good!

Here are a few hints on how to avoid this case.

Templates

Templates are considered as duplicates, so be careful. For search engines, the navigation menu, the footer and the header, which are usual parts of a template, look like duplicate content. There is not much you can do about that. The template is to be found in every page of your domain, so what can you do avoid this? In a page you have your template content, but also the content unique to the page in question, and which is not part of the template. So you want to make sure that the number of words used for the content outisde of the template is superior to the number of words used in yout template. If your templates use 200 words, but that the rest of the content for a page uses 230 words, then you’ll be in the safe zone. So make sure to control the word density of your template content vs non template content for every page of your domain.

Meta title & description

Avoid using identical titles and descriptions tags for every pages of your domain. And there is no point in differentiating your title or description with just generic words such as « an », « in », or « how ». Those are called stop words, and are completely ignored by search engines. So for a search engine these two titles are identical: MBonte.com: all about SEO & MBonte.com: all on SEO.

Here is the list of stop words: I, a, about, an, are, as, at, be, by, com, de, en, for, from, how, in, is, it, la, of, on, or, htat, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will, with, und, www. So there is no point in using those.

Try to use a descriptive and unique title & description for each of your pages. This is simple enough to do, and will avoid your domain a great deal of trouble with search engines, and the search results for your pages will be much more relevant. You want that!

Multiple URLs

Many sites have multiple copies of their homepage accessible to vistors, and indexed in search engines. For instance, for the present site we could have these different versions: http://mbonte.com, http://www.mbonte.com, or http://www.mbonte.com/fr/index.

These are all different URLs, and each are counted as different URLs. If some sites link to the www.mbonte.com version, some to the mbonte.com and so on, links to the same page are split across three URLs. So what could have been nine links pointing to one page could be just three links pointing to three. And Google will only display one in search engines, so it picks one, and attributes only three links to it. You’ll hence lose link juice, which are very important for search engines in determining rankings.

If this is the case for your domain, you should decide on a single URL and setup 301 permanent redirects to notify search engines to pass the link credit from all pages that redirect to the page you choose.

There are other issues of duplicate content, and only a few were described in this article. But what must known here, is that duplicate content should not be taken lightly. Here is little tool that will help you identify duplicate content in your web site: Copyscape.