Nothing’s wrong with this, mind you. Flash navigation is bad and needs to not exist.

But there are plenty of good reasons to [...]]]> The Google Webmaster Blog has a post about uses of Flash in Web pages. Naturally, as one might expect from Google, they focus on the ability of Googlebot or other spiders to ’see’ Flash.

Nothing’s wrong with this, mind you. Flash navigation is bad and needs to not exist.

But there are plenty of good reasons to use Flash. For instance, while it may not be spiderable, I know two sites where Flash ‘product builders’ are key drivers for conversion. Timbuk2, who make really great bicycle bags (and who’ve branched off into other bags too), have a great bag configurator tool that allows you to build your custom bag, see it, share it, and buy it. (I totally recommend their laptop bag, by the way.)

Similarly, Orbea’s USA site has a lot of Flash. But, they’re a brand play first and foremost. They are bikes yearned for by fanboys (and fangirls, hi), and aren’t going to be a primary (or tertiary, or billionary) choice for a casual shopper looking for help with bike selection on the Internet. Their bike builder tool is teh swanky. And that’s not a site that’s going to need lots of ‘how to choose components,’ since, again: the audience. We know what we like, and it’s shiny, light, and high-tech. Er, did I just say we? Anyway, a few runs through a configurator, then the next stop is a local shop who can help you fit and order a nice bit of carbon fiber with Italian componentry…

er, I digress. Again.

Flash can be a good part of a user experience. Not every site needs to live and die by spiderability. Should Flash be surrounded by spiderable goodness? Sure. Should a site owner decry Flash because it’s not 100% full of SEO goodness? Not if by adding Flash they can get people to drop some change.

(PS: Santa, all I really want for Christmas is Diva with a full Campy Chorus gruppo. I promise to be good.)

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on [...]]]> Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

• Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
• John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
• Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
• Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
• Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
• Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a [...]]]> I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.

Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:

• Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
• Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
• Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
• Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.

I think keyword research is important. A lot of it is verifying the obvious, [...]]]> Like it or not, search engine optimization still starts at the page level. Without belittling the importance of quality site architecture and design, the first thing most people will think of when you say ‘SEO’ will be keyword research and content optimization.

I think keyword research is important. A lot of it is verifying the obvious, but sometimes you can find some hidden gems to target if you take some effort and get creative.

However, creativity and effectiveness is limited by your source choice. Different tools offer different advantages. Without going into a recommendation of ‘pick THIS one,’ here are factors I tend to consider when choosing a tool:

1. What’s the data source? — some tools pull from meta search engines, some from ISP data, some from just their own source. Some have many data streams.
2. Does that data source have the potential to represent your target audience? — you can have a ton of data, but, say I’m targeting US Hispanics. A data pull from Yahoo Spain isn’t going to be representative for me, as it’ll use Castillian Spanish and represent the interests of Spaniards, not Spanish speakers from Latin America living in the US!
3. What’s it cost? — Hey, we’ve all had gigs where the budget for pretty much anything, including our own salaries and benefits, was equal to bupka. Sure, the Google and Overture tools have intense limitations, but the price is right.

I think a lot of elementary level SEOs don’t look at where the database for any given tool is sourced from, which means they’re missing an important decision factor in keyword selection. Looking at sources, and not just numbers and proportions, is one of the things an SEO can do to truly consult on content optimization. Anyone can parrot terms from a tool — a monkey who didn’t take its Ritalin can do that.

Content converts. Putting enough effort and creativity in at the front end gets you the data you need in analytics to make continued informed judgements in the long-term, and actually build traffic from a solid base.

This is a really brief list, relative to what’s in my head: