Adobe Flash is a programmable format that allows designers to illustrate using interactive multimedia elements  to create things such as: movies, buttons, banners, games, maps, and more.   It’s a popular way for web developers to add animation to a project and build interactive, visually appealing websites.

Many web developers LOVE flash animation and use it in all of their website projects.  They design entire websites using Flash.  This is because the websites look nice, and have various animations, moving graphics, cool audio effects and vector graphics, etc.  The problem is however, that Flash is a poor substitute for HTML and some search engines are unable to crawl and index websites made completely with Flash. Flash movies also often take a long time to load so you are potentially loosing customers who don’t want to wait.

In June 2008, Google announced that they improved their indexing of websites containing Flash files. Has this really helped?  Randfish over at SEOmoz did a great post on Flash and SEO.  He outlines the following reasons as to why he believes that Flash and SEO don’t mix.

1. Different Content is Found on the Same URLs
2. The Way Text is Broken Down
3. Flash Can Get Embedded Resulting in Low PR and Link Juice
4. You Can’t Earn External Links with Flash Like You Can With HTML
5. Basic SEO is Often Missing with Flash
6. A Lot of Flash is Not Crawlable by Search Engines

Why We Like Flash:

As for web designers, animation and moving graphics look really nice on websites.   It also works well for banner ads and advertisements as compared to GIFs.

Why We DON’T Like Flash:

Flash movies are slow to load.  Oftentimes when a Flash Home page  is visited, it takes many seconds (sometimes minutes) to load.  This can potentially result in lost business.  When people are online, they want to get to their destination quickly and not wait for fancy graphics to pop-up before they can go anywhere on your website.  They will click OUT of your website and go to your competitors’ site before waiting for your movie to load.

Flash animation is also not great for SEO – not yet at least. It doesn’t harm your SEO as far as penalties with Google but it does not allow for proper optimization.  Google has made some improvements with how they index Flash, but there is still a lot to be done before search engines are able to fully index Flash and have it compare to an HTML website with proper SEO implemented.

Bottom Line:

Flash is great for advertisements, banners, etc., but not so much for SEO – not yet.  This is bound to change in the near future.  If you currently want to use Flash on a website – do so with caution.  Keep it to a minimum and don’t have your entire website built on Flash animation.  This can harm you in the SERPS.

Start brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords that are associated with your business and the types of services you have to offer. Try and come up with a list of around 5-10 keywords to start.  Here are 11 things to consider when choosing a domain name for your new website or blog:

The Shorter The Better

You can have a domain name that is up to 67 characters long but in my opinion, this is way too long.  Short names are easier to remember and easier to type in.  7-10 characters is optimal but harder and harder to come by these days so do your best. Try and choose a name that’s under 3 words as well.  Longer domain names with too many words are difficult to remember and if there are too many keywords, the search engines may see it as keyword spamming.

Use Your Business Name

If you have a off-line business with a real world presence, you’ll want to use your business name in the URL if possible.  Many commonly used business names are already taken, especially the shorter ones but try and get at least a portion of your business name in the URL.  This will help with branding purposes and it’ll help your customers remember your company’s name. For instance, there’s a Sacramento company called “Liberty Bell Alarm and Home Theater” that chose the domain name www.libertybellalarm.com.  They didn’t use their entire name in their URL – which would be too long – but they got the first portion of it which is good.

Use Keywords

If you are starting an online business, try and choose a domain name that has some of your keywords for SEO purposes.  You don’t want to use TOO many keywords though since the search engines may see it as keyword stuffing.  If you owned a web design company in the Sacramento area called “Sacramento Web Design and SEO Company”, you wouldn’t want to use the entire name in the URL.  If the name was available, you could use http://sacramentowebdesign.com.  This would be a good URL since you have your location, part of your business name, as well as keywords for your services “web design” and “services” all in the URL.  Keywords in your URL also help with incoming links to your website.  When someone links to your site from an outside source, your keywords will be listed in the URL which is an SEO advantage.

Easy To Remember

When choosing a domain name, find one that’s easy to remember.  You want to avoid getting crafty and clever with your name.  A name that seems easy and obvious to you may be difficult for someone else to remember.

Easy To Type

You also want to choose a domain name that’s easy to type in.  Avoid words that are difficult to spell such as: ache, calendar, and conscientious.

Endings – .Com, .Net, .Org

There are split views on what’s the best ending for a domain name.  Many people will ONLY choose .com domains since people are used to typing this in.  The argument is that people naturally assume that a domain is .com and will always want to type this in.  Other people believe that .org and .net are very suitable endings as well.  .Org for instance has the connotation that you belong to an organization or non-profit outfit which can be beneficial for your  company’s image. Many of the .com domains are already taken as well so settling for a .org or .net may be your answer.  Personally, I always look for the .com domains first but will take a .org or .net name if the .com is unavailable.

Hyphenated vs Non-Hyphenated

There are pros and cons of having words hyphenated in a URL.  One of the benefits of choosing a hyphenated domain name is that it helps a lot with SEO.   Search engines are able to easily pick out your keywords and separate them where keywords in a non-hyphenated name are sometimes melded together by the search engines.   You may also find that a name you really wanted to use is already taken in the non-hyphenated form so in order to get the name you want, you may need to get the hyphenated form. The downside of hyphenated names is that they are difficult to type in, tricky to remember, and often left out when someone is referring a website via word-of-mouth.

Get a Unique Name

Choose a domain name that is unique.  A name that is too similar to another website may result in lost business when people type in the other website instead.

Avoid Abbreviations and Acronyms

Business name abbreviations for the most part are hard to remember.  Since there are only letters and no keywords, this is also not good for SEO.

Don’t Use Trademarked Names

This may seem obvious, but avoid using trademarked names in your domain name. There is a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) which protects trademarked names in URLS.

Ask For a 2nd Opinion

When choosing a domain name, before settling on one that you like, ask a few other people what they think.  A name that seems easy to remember and simple to type in to you may be obscure and for someone else.

Tools For Choosing Keywords:

There are many different keyword tools out there that offer up this type of information. Some are free while  others charge for their services.  Some keyword tool creators charge a monthly subscription fee while others charge a flat fee to purchase the software.

Here are a  few different tools for choosing keywords for SEO purposes.  There are others out there but these are some of the more popular ones:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - This is the most well known and widely used keyword tool out there and the good news is – it’s FREE! This is the main tool we use daily to find new and relevant keywords to use for customers as well as our own content.  Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to learn more.

Market Samurai - This is the 2nd keyword tool we use daily to find new keywords.  It currently costs around $100 but it is a 1-time fee and WELL worth it.  Once you purchase the software, you own it for life and all software updates are free.  It offers much more information than other tools and it is easy to use.  Visit www.marketsamurai.com to learn more.

Wordtracker Free Suggestion Keyword Tool - This is another free keyword tool to help you with choosing relevant keywords for SEO.  After you type in a root keyword that you are interested in, it will display the top 100 searches that people are looking  for.  It tells you how many times per day that people search for these specific keywords.  Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com to learn more.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker also has a paid version of their keyword suggestion tool.  It offers up a lot more information but is not necessarily needed for optimizing a small business website.  It currently costs  $329 to purchase the software or $59 monthly if you only want to use the software temporarily.

Keyword Spy - This is another keyword tool to help with choosing the right keywords. There is a paid and free version of this software.  This tool also allows you to spy on your competitors and see what keywords they are using as well as what ads they are specifically using to drive more business to their websites.

How to Start Choosing Keywords:

There are various ways to go about choosing keywords for SEO but I’m going to cover my technique using the Adwords tool.  Your goal is to find keywords that have enough people searching for them with little competition.  The less competition you have for a specific keyword, the higher your chances are for ranking well for the keyword.

Since most of the 1-2 word keyword phrases have lots of competition already, it’s good to search for long-tail keywords as well.  These are 3+ word combination.  For example, if you run a plumbing business in Chicago, you may want to start searching for words such as:

• “Chicago IL plumber”
• “plumber in Chicago”
• “Chicago plumbing business”

Head over to Adwords and type in your root keywords which in the above example would be “chicago plumber”.  After you type this into the Adwords, you will get a ton of keyword suggestions – many of which will be too general and not applicable to a local business.  As you look through the keywords, click the “Add” link  to the right of the words that apply to your business.

I usually look for keywords that have at least 3000 searches a month.  With a local business however, you may need to be choosing keywords that have closer to 300-500 searches a month since you are dealing with a smaller geographic location.  When you get your keywords laser targeted (in this case by adding in the specific location), you know that the traffic you are getting to your website is looking for the services you offer.

Keep adding in new keywords and see what the tool returns to you.  You can do repeated searches and just keep adding new words to grow your list.  Rearrange the wording (i.e. “chicago plumber” and “plumber in “chicago”) to see if Google gives you any new suggestions.  As you “Add” the keywords to your list, on the right hand side of the screen you will see your keywords list grow.

When you are finished adding words, click the link that says “.csv (for excel)” which is below your list.  This will export you list to Excel. Add the following columns into your Excel spreadsheet: “Keyword”, “Search Vol”, “Exact”, and “allintitle”.  Put your keywords under the keyword column and add in the search volume from Google Adwords under the Search Vol column.

Your next job is to look at the competition for these keywords. After choosing your keywords, go to Google to see what the competition looks like.  I usually search for words that have less than 30,000 competing pages and less than 3000 pages that have the keyword in their HTML title tag.  Here’s how to look  for this information:

Find Total Competing Pages For Your Keyword

Add quotations around your keywords and separately add the keywords into a Google search. This is called an exact match.  In the image below, the total number of competing pages is 32,500.  This means that there are 32,500 pages indexed in Google that have this exact string of keywords.

Record this number in your Excel spreadsheet and repeat this step for all of your keywords.

Next you want to find the total number of pages that have this exact keyword string in their title.  If the keyword is in a web page’ title, this means that the website is trying to rank for this keyword.

Find Total Competing Pages For Your Keyword in Title

You then need to type in allintitle:”keyword” into a Google search (or other search engine) to see # pages with your keyword in title.

As you can see there are 922 pages that have this exact keyword in title. Not bad for a 2 word keywords combination!

Here’s what your excel spreadsheet should look like:

When choosing keywords, in this example, I would try and rank for the keyword “Chicago plumber”.  This may be tough depending on who is currently dominating the front page of Google  but there are other SEO tactics you can do to try and rank higher.  We will go into these in the near future.  On a side note, a keyword tool such as Market Samurai will do all of these steps for you, all you need to do is add in your root keyword.

There are different types of meta tags including title meta tags, description meta tags, and keywords meta tags. These are discussed below.

These tags are not visible to the user unless they look within the source code of a website. Here’s an example of what meta tags look like within the HTML portion of a website:

This may look a bit confusing at first but we’re going to explain what this means below.  Now here’s what meta tags look to the user when they do a search within Google. The title tag is displayed on top and the meta description tag is the displayed beneath it.

Meta Title Tag - The HTML title tag is the title of your website’s page.  In the images above the title of the web page is “Sacramento Website Design | Web Development | SEO | NeoVetta.com“.  It tells search engines and Internet users what your web page is about. It should contain specific keywords that are found within the web page and it should be concise.  Google displays 66 characters (including spaces) for the title of a web page so try and keep it around this number.  Each page of your website should have a unique HTML title tag.  When you visit the actual web page, the title of the page is also displayed at the very top of your browser window in blue. Here’s a HTML meta title tag:

<TITLE> This is the page Title </TITLE>

Meta Description Tag - The meta description tag is a short description of the web page. Each page of your website or blog should have a different concise description of it’s content.  Again this should contain keywords found on the page. The meta description is only visible to users when they do a search within a search engine.  The 2nd image above displays  what users will see for a meta description. Google displays 150 characters for meta descriptions but you can have a description that is longer.  The question of meta description length is answered at Google’s Webmaster help here: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/7c5dc8cbb5f07dcd. You also want these descriptions to be in complete sentence form.  Make it enticing and relevant to draw in more clicks. Here’s a HTML meta description tag:

<META NAME = “Description” CONTENT =”content”>

Meta Keywords Tag - The HTML meta keyword tag is where the keywords for your web page are entered.  These are not visible to users unless they go specifically searching for them within the source code of your page.  Keywords tell search engines what the web page is about and it is recommended that you only enter around 2-5 unique and relevant keywords per page. You can enter more but less is always better.  You can then focus the keywords on your page around a limited number of words to keep it focused. Each keyword should be separated with a comma (keyword1, keyword2, keyword3).  Here’s a HTML meta keywords tag:

<META NAME = “Keywords” CONTENT=”keyword1, keyword2″>

Keywords used to play a much more important role in search engine placement but due to webmasters abusing them, they are not used by many of the major search engines anymore.

Not sure whether or not your website has HTML meta tags? To tell whether or not your website has title tags, go to the page in question and simply look at the top of your browser.  The very top of your browser will be highlighted in blue and this is the title of the page.  You can also go to the website and type in “Ctrl” + “u” to look at the source code.  You should see something that looks similar to the first image above with HTML contained within <HEAD></HEAD> tags.

Be sure that each page of your website has unique HTML meta descriptions.  This does not guarantee you top search engine placement but it will definitely help users find your website.  It will also increase the the likelihood of users clicking on your web page. If your website has a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Joomla, you will be able to easily modify your website’s HTML meta tags.  Also, if your descriptions are well written, relevant, concise, and enticing, users will want to click through to your website and learn more.

What exactly are meta description tags?  Here’s an image of the meta tags for the Home page of NeoVetta.com.

A meta tag description is a brief descriptions for a specific page on your website which is placed within the “head” area of your individual web pages.  This is either done by you or your web designer if you are unfamiliar with writing HTML.  Content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla make it easy for most anyone to add in their own meta tags.

Each page, post, or article on your website should have a unique meta description tag.  Since the above image is a  description for the Home page of NeoVetta, we cover all of the services we offer in a nutshell.  Just as a note, the top part that says “Sacramento Website Design | Web Development…” is called the “title tag”.  We will discuss this at another time.

When you type in a specific string of words into a search within Google (or other search engine), relevant websites appear that contain the words you typed in.  For instance, in the image above, you will see that the keyword string “Sacramento Website Design” is highlighted within the meta description tag.  This is because I typed in “Sacramento Website Design” into a Google search and NeoVetta was one of the results that popped up.  Meta description tags increases the likelihood that a person will click on your website since it contains specific relevant keywords.

Meta descriptions do not guarantee top placement in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS) but they do help.  Since webmasters have abused the use of meta descriptions over the years to increase their rankings, search engine creators have had to de-emphasized the importance of these tags.  They are still an important factor however since they help people decide whether or not to click through to your website.  When writing your meta description tags, be sure to write short, concise, relevant, descriptions which entice the user to click through to your website.

If you are unfamiliar with HTML, and not be using a Content Management System (CMS) be sure to ask your web designer to add this information in for you.  If you DO have a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla installed on your website, then you be able to easily change the meta tag information without typing in any HTML.  There will be sections labeled “Meta Description”, “Meta Title”, “Meta Keywords”, etc. where you will be able to make each page of your website unique.

The HTML title tag for a page of your website is also displayed when Internet users type in specific keywords.  For example, below is an image from a Google search for the keyword string “Sacramento website design“.  As you can see, these words are highlighted within the meta title tag and the meta description (the sentence directly below the title tag).  This is important since it draws the eye of the Internet user who typed in this specific keyword string – also called a long-tail keyword string. After reading the title of your web page, the user has the chance to decide whether or not the content on your web page is what they are looking for:

The HTML title tag is also displayed at the top of a web browser when a web page is visited.  For instance, if a user clicked on the title tag above after entering in their keyword string “Sacramento Website Design | Web Development |  SEO | Neovetta.com” they would be taken to the home page of NeoVetta.com.  Here’s what the user would see at the top of their web browser when they got to NeoVetta’s home page:

This title meta tag is displayed at the top portion of your browser, followed by the  type of web browser you are using i.e. Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.

If someone bookmarks your page, the title meta tag is also displayed within their bookmarks section:

HTML title tags are important since they allow search engines and users to determine whether or not the content on your web page is relevant to specific searches made using a search engine.  It is also important for the purpose of bookmarking.  To optimize your meta tags, make sure that each page has unique content with unique titles and descriptions.  This will help your search engine placement immensely.

If you haven’t already embraced the idea of business article marketing, you should seriously consider doing so.  Article marketing is not only a great way to talk about your business and tell customers about your field, it is also a great way to get more eyes to your website.

After you set-up a website or blog, the next step is getting more traffic and backlinks to your site.  Article marketing is a great way to accomplish this.  After you write a well written article – or hire a freelance writer to do so – you submit the article to one of the major article directories.

Ezine Articles is one of the largest article directories available online today.  Virtually anyone who writes good content (in English) can have their articles posted on Ezine Articles.  The sign-up process is simple and you can start submitting content immediately.  The great part about Ezine is that they allow authors to add a 2 active links at the bottom of their articles.  When people are finished reading your content, they can click on the link to go directly your website.

So why exactly is business article marketing sooooo important for online business?  Here are 3 reasons why article writing will help increase traffic to your website or blog.

1) Backlinks - This is probably the most important reason why article marketing is so beneficial.  Backlinks are inbound links to your website from another site. As mentioned above, some article directories will allow you to put an active link back to your website and these are the directories you want to submit content to. Some directories will not allow you to add in backlinks so be sure to choose one that does.  A few of the larger sites that allow active links include: Ezine Articles, Go Articles, ArticlesBase, and Article City. Google and other search engines also give higher ranking to websites that have lots of inbound links to their sites.  By increasing your inbound links through article marketing, you will be increase your placement in the SERPS.

2) Increased Exposure – By writing and submitting content to article directories online, you increase traffic to your website.  This is because when you submit your content to these sites, other online marketers are able to come and swoop up your article and post them on their websites.  They are allowed to do so if they leave the resource box intact – the place where you enter the link to your website.  People online are always searching for new content/articles to place on their websites and if you write a well written article, they may very well choose yours to place on their site.  Also, if you choose your keywords properly and do the correct amount of keyword saturation, Google and other major search engines will pick up your articles and display them within the search engine results page (SERPS).  Choosing keywords is topic for another day so we will cover this in the near future.

3) Expert in Your Field – By writing articles in a field that you are familiar with, you can establish yourself as an expert.  The more articles you write, the more people will come to see you as an expert in your field.  More people will want to read your content and they will tell others about it as well through social bookmarking, etc.

Business article marketing is a huge part of online business development.  By writing content on something you are familiar with you will increase traffic to your website.  This is accomplished through inbound links, content spreading, and through establishing yourself as an expert.  Start with one article directory and then branch out.  I recommend starting with Ezine Articles since they get high placement in Google and other major search engines and then move on to a few others.