Search Marketing Expo East

In search marketing conferences, there are so much to information that it is impossible to listen to everything so everyone chooses their tracks/sessions wisely to listen to the golden nuggets of information which may not be the same golden nuggets of everyone else. Depending also on each individual’s knowledge dictates if a nugget is really golden of not. So that is why I start my title with a “My” since this is what I found to be valuable to me. Below are my top 10 takeaways from the 2009 Search Marketing Expo East in New York City.

1. Yahoo announced they no longer use the Meta Keywords tag as a ranking factor

The moment this was announced, I had my doubts, I had to double check if it was true since in our own BusinessOnLine SEO Lab, we have tested this before and we all know it is only Yahoo that reads the Meta Keywords tag. With an erratic wifi connection at Javits Conference Center in New York, I relied on my iPhone to check our SEOLabs testing sites and true enough, our unique keyword that was used only on 1 page inside the meta keywords tag that used to show up in Yahoo does not show up anymore! Initial thoughts were, wow, totally useless tag now, we can probably just delete it out. But apparently, Danny Sullivan tested it out and it was showing that Yahoo still looks at the meta keyword tag. False announcement? Faulty system? Delayed search algorithmic processing? I don’t know.

2. A page blocked in robots.txt may still appear in Google search results.

You block it in robots.txt, but it get’s linked from elsewhere, it ends up in the SERPs but with no Title or Description, just the URL. This was best summarized in a video by Matt Cutts.

Learn more about robots.txt. – The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) Buy the book now!

3. Images will tend to rank better if they are near the title/header of a page.

While listening to Google Engineer Maile Ohye on the session ask the search engines, it was nice to see a different face than Matt Cutts from time to time and she did mention about images ranking better in Google image search and Google onebox if they are near the title/header of a page which I believe totally makes sense. There are so many images a blog or news site can have and multiple articles can appear. Just knowing which image goes with which title can be challenging, so choosing the image closest to the header tag would make perfect sense.

4. Images with captions will help rank better in Google Image search.

Again for the same reasons above, it seems alternative text (the alt attribute of the <img> tag) is not sufficient to help these images rank well in universal search results, image search and onebox results. Maile summarizes it also well on her video on news search under the FAQs part of this presentation, starting at 11:03.

Image Database: Image and Search Retrieval – Buy this book now!

5. JPEGs will do better than PNGs and GIFs

If you listened to the video of Maile well, you should have heard this already as she summarizes it pretty well into clear cut bullet points. Maybe some of you think image search is not that important and may not give enough quality converting traffic, but it really depends on your product or service and what user intent you can spin around your images. In the presentation below by Peter Lindsey, he explains different places where images can appear, onebox, maps, shopping, image search, and various user intent like inspiration, shopping, research, health, and very interesting, as a visual dictionary. He explains how in image search it is not all about being number 1. Image searchers go through many pages before they find the perfect image to click on.

Image Databases: Search and Retrieval of Digital Imagery

6. Good Web Server and Scripts Security helps in SEO.

In the session Ask the Search Engines, there were representatives from Google, Yahoo and Bing. And the Bing representative, Sasi Parthasarathy talked more about network security, the importance of server hardening, and making your scripts secure. And he showed many examples of queries he just did the day before of various websites that were compromised where either new pages are coming our selling unrelated products like pharmaceutical products, or similar pages on spammed forums or blogs on .gov or .edu websites and more that can be harming the SEO efforts or simply hurting the reputation of the site that has been attacked. This was not really like new information to me, but it was a big reminder how many blackhats out there and that they are really many of them that could be harming your own ranking.

7. Do not use English keywords and simply translate using tools for international SEO.

For international SEO for other languages, and the lack of robust keyword research tools in other languages, some SEO practitioners use English keyword research and simply translates the words using online tools and thinks these keywords are already the best keywords for another language. Andy Atkins-Krueger who is one of the popular authorities in international search has explained this pretty clearly where a direct translation may not really mean the same thing in the translated language. It is always best to get a local speaker of the language and do the appropriate translation for you.

8. SEO factor to possibly consider: Readability

This was not from one of the SEO sessions I attended, but this idea was mainly from one of the exhibit booths, specifically from Bruce Clay who we all now is one of the pioneers in the industry and has been mapping out the search engine relationships from the very beginning and keeps on updating them and is now getting less and less confusing as the main players in the search industries keep decreasing. Going back to the topic, as I was spying out checking out their tools on how it can benefit me, everything seemed like I can find a tool or some equivalent tool I already know that I can use instead of using Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set, although one thing that I noticed that I have not seen in other tools is they take note of Readability.

Readability tests, readability formulas, or readability metrics are formulae for evaluating the readability of text, usually by counting syllables, words, and sentences. Readability tests are often used as an alternative to conducting an actual statistical survey of human readers of the subject text (a readability survey).

- Wikipedia definition of readability

There were a few scoring systems used which I can’t remember which ones were on the SEO ToolSet, but upon search on wikipedia, there are a lot of scoring systems:

• Accelerated Reader ATOS
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Coleman-Liau Index
• Dale-Chall Readability Formula
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
• Fry Readability Formula
• Gunning-Fog Index
• Lexile Framework for Reading
• Linsear Write
• Raygor Estimate Graph
• SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook)
• Spache Readability Formula

After a simple search of online tools, I was able to find two tools that can be used: SMOG online tool and using Read Able. Now would this be a critical search engine ranking factor? I am not sure, my gut feeling says it is not that critical but could still be a good factor for other purposes. Readability is a metric for showing how easy or how hard some text could be read by some age group, so it does make sense to optimize this for your readers, and not really for search engines, which is what search engines want you to do SEO anyway.

9. Google is getting better and better in reading JavaScript.

We have been reading this is various places being said by various representatives from Google in various ways, so I am convinced Google is pretty smart already in understanding JavaScript. In this specific situation where I was reminded again at SMX was during one of the sessions where Maile Ohye gave an example of using the Link Rel=Canonical tag showing various international sites in folders and using the link rel canonical to point all to the English version. I then asked if we can use geolocation detection by IP and run a JavaScript redirect so search engine would still look at the final English version as dictated by the Link rel canonical but users will experience something different depending on their geolocation and JavaScript will kick in to serve the appropriate page. I was given the answer that just because it is a JavaScript redirect does not mean Google will not follow the redirect. Conversation ended without a good answer since they asked me to ask this in the International SEO session instead. But with an answer like that, again confirms again that Google is really reading JavaScript.

10. Google is proposing the #! in URLs for crawling AJAX sites using a headless browser.

In the session where I was speaking more on CSS and code positioning and duplicate links order, there were two other Google representatives, Bruce Johnson and Kathrin Probst talking about crawling AJAX. They are proposing a new way to make AJAX sites. AJAX developers all know how convenient it would be to use the # symbol in URLs as a parameter since you can pass this around in the URL and the page does not even reload. You use it like a GET variable, but ideal for AJAX since AJAX sites do not require page reloading. And search engines normally will not see this since URLs with different text strings after the # symbol will all be treated like the same URL without the #.

Normally websites would treat these URLs as the same URL:

http://www.example.com/path/file.html

http://www.example.com/path/file.html#parameter1

http://www.example.com/path/file.html#parameter2

http://www.example.com/path/file.html#parameter1-valuex

And since the # parameters cannot be read by server-side programming languages (PHP, ASP, JSP, etc), and are read on the client-side by your web browser and JavaScript, search engines would not even see the changes on the page. So Google proposes something new, the use of the #!.

Now Google was proposing the use of a headless browser. This is a browser with no UI, but mainly like some script interpreting JavaScript code just like how a browser does. That way it will first fetch a page with the # parameters and render it first in the headless browser before Googlebot crawls the content. As this is only a proposal and is in experimental stages, to trigger the headless browser, you simply use #! instead of # in your URLs.

Being a developer myself and was sitting in that same session, I was curious to know how will we determine if Googlebot crawled the content correctly, and I asked if Google cache could be used. Kathrin replied no. And said they might make a separate tool for this. Maybe they would include it in Google Webmaster Tools. Vanessa Fox also added Google does crawl Flash links and Flash content but Google cache is also not a good way to see what Googlebot sees.

Interesting that AJAX for SEO is starting to get easier and easier and no need to do some complicated tricks once this headless browser crawling becomes a standard. This is definitely something the web analytics team would like to look at deeper for tracking AJAX.

Again this is “my” top 10 takeaways. Of course someone more interested in PPC, or SMO might have something else as their main takeaways.

After being on vacation in the Philippines during Typhoon Ondoy, speaking at SEMCon 2009 and SMX East 2009, I come back to work after 2 weeks and suddenly plays catch up with all the work that has been waiting for me and that kept me busy for the whole week that this SMX post is way overdue, but better late than later.

Bookmark to:

Related SEO Blog Post

• November 17, 2008 -- SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content (3)
• September 3, 2008 -- Google Chrome – The Google Web Browser (1)
• December 14, 2007 -- More Tips About Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the No Script Tag (0)
• December 12, 2007 -- Making AJAX SEO Friendly (10)
• October 6, 2010 -- Upcoming Webinar: International SEO – How to Establish a Global Web Presence with a Localized Feel (0)

Lightbox JS was popularized by Lokesh Dhakar where he made a nice friendly degradable JavaScript function where thumbnails can be linked to their larger images but load dynamically using JavaScript in a separate <div> box that loads in an animated manner. Many webmasters have adapted this and users like it too since there are no more page reloading and the need to hit the back button to go back to the thumbnail view. You can see demonstrations on the Lightbox JS website. After Lightbox JS came out, many other implementations of this technology emerged where the applications have been used not only for images, but for videos and also any content in general. The benefit of using this technique aside from the seamless fluid integration, they do not open as separate popup windows using a new web browser instance that is sometimes anti-popup blockers.

Generally, when would you use Lightbox JS?

When you need to display something briefly to the website visitor and you do not want them to leave the current page where the page has to reload again and to move back, you would have to press the back button. Often you see this in:

• Thumbnail Preview Images
  When clicked on, they open the larger image in a Lightbox.
  *Real life example. (Click on any image on the page.)
• Thumbnail Preview Videos and other Animations
  Similar to images, just using animations or videos.
  *Real life example Click on any video thumbnail.)
• Tips and Other Brief Helpful Information
  As guides to users on your website, you can give small tips here and there without them getting lost in the loading of a new page.
  *Real life example (Click for more information on each dog.)
• Fill Up of Quick Forms
  Quick questionnaires, surveys and other simple forms that would only take a few minutes or seconds to fill up. People may want to fill up these quick forms.
  *Real life example (Click on Request a Quote)

SEO Issues in using Lightbox JS and Similar Technologies

Depending on how you intend to use Lightbox, each way can have their own unique SEO issue.

• Content Written by JavaScript/AJAX
  If the content of the dHTML popup window is written by AJAX or even JavaScript alone, search engines disregard this content.
• Loss of keyword focus with multiple Lightboxes
  Content of a Lightbox JS popup can be already existing on the same page but are not displayed right away using some CSS and/or JavaScript tricks and their contents only appear when pulled by the dHTML popup. Here is an *example of this where three lightboxes are on top, but the content is actually on the page already as non-displayed <div> boxes.

  Somehow this is sometimes good because the content can be read by the search engines as they are all on the same page. This works well for photo galleries with picture descriptions. At least we know search engines can read the content.

  This does not work if various Lightbox popups were meant to have different topics and this mixes the focus of the keywords on a single page.

• Pulled from a different URL
  This may solve issues with keyword focus, as you selectively choose the content on the page and anything in a Lightbox can be on a separate page not diluting the content focus. Although the problem here is the content will be pulled in various ways, either AJAX or HTML iframes, where both have crawling issues.

SEO Solution to Lightbox JS content

There are many out-of-the box code, ready to use for the Lightbox JS effect. Here are a few:

• Lightbox JS
• Thickbox
• HighSlide
• Greybox
• Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux
• Lighbox Gone Wild

You can totally make one from scratch or you can use one of the above and modify the code. For the purposes of this discussion, I chose Greybox. Because it is easy to use having the content source as a separate file. This solves the problem of content focus dilution. Greybox is pretty easy to implement by any web designer/developer and links are clean and degrades gracefully which is a good practice of using JavaScript and AJAX for SEO.

The solution does not rely on modifying Greybox in any way. The solution is really within the file that loads within the Greybox.

To explain this further, look at the *SEO friendly Lightbox JS example found here using Greybox.

There are two links found on that page. The first one is how you normally implement Greybox and the second is how it is done to make it SEO friendly.

The nice thing with these Lightboxes, the links are normal links with normal <a href=”…”> values, this way they are crawled properly by search engines which is good. The not so good part is when the contents of these Lightboxes get indexed by search engines, they are indexing a partial page and you do not necessarily want people to land on this partial page. Thus you can use JavaScript to redirect to a similar page with the same content but with the navigation and design elements the page normally has.

Why a JavaScript redirect?

Search engines disregard JavaScript, and this is what you really want to happen since the design elements are only for the users and not for the search engines. Just be very careful to make the content of both the Lightbox and standalone page exactly the same to avoid running into any red flags that may perceive the site do be hiding any content.

Notice in the examples above, there is no difference between the two implementations in terms of how it executes. Although as search engines crawl the contents of these Lightboxes, and when visited directly on a link from a search engine, people will see two different looking pages.

When both implementations will be crawled and indexed, the link found in search engine results will appear differently. The normal implementation will display a partial page that nobody would want to go to. This can be as worse as a 404 page. Because it seems to go nowhere and appears to be not part of the site. The optimized Lightbox JS example on the right will show something else. It will still pull in the correct page template and would work as a standalone perfectly fine. Thus pleasing both search engines and human visitors of your website.

Greybox uses an iframe running this file and parameter: greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0 Depending where you saved your greybox files, the absolute URL of this will be your referring URL. Using your favorite scripting language, detect the referring URL and redirect by JavaScript to a page for humans with the exact same content but with the design elements and Navigations. Also include a noindex tag on this page to avoid any duplicate content issues. In the examples posted, the SEO friendly Lightbox JS loads seofriendly.php, but if the referring URL is not Greybox, it redirects to a noindex page seofriendlyuser.php. This example used PHP with the following code:

<?php if($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]
!="http://www.ajaxoptimize.com/seogreybox/js/greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0"){ ?>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
<!--
window.location = "seofriendlyuser.php";
//-->
</script>
<? } ?>

Although this example was in PHP, this could also be done in other languages. You may need to do your own research on that for .Net, ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, MivaScript, JSP, Phyton, TCL and other languages

*Examples above are used to show that this is used by current day web designers. BusinessOnLine is not associated with any of the websites used above. The examples above may change or modify their website over time and may not be valid examples in the future but were valid examples during the time this blog post was first written.

Bookmark to:

Related SEO Blog Post

• February 15, 2008 -- 4 SEO Solutions For Flash (14)
• December 14, 2007 -- More Tips About Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the No Script Tag (0)
• December 12, 2007 -- Making AJAX SEO Friendly (10)
• October 19, 2009 -- My 10 Main SEO Takeaways from SMX East 2009 (6)
• November 10, 2008 -- Top 5 Ways to Evalute the SEO Ability of Your Creative Agency or Web Design Firm (9)

Released as beta a version to testers, Google Analytics can now tag certain events that happen on a page that are normally not tracked by default on many other analytics platforms. This is common on websites that use AJAX and Flash, which are two technologies based on the current trends will just see more and more of these technologies used. Thus there is a great demand for tracking the events on sites like these.

Often web analytics platforms track many server and browser variables once an HTML rendered page loads. Problem today is many page elements powered by AJAX and Flash does not reload a new page. Thus an AJAX or Flash heavy site may be having a lot of user activity but are not effectively tracked as common web analytics software are not being able to track these events without a page loading.

Google Analytics new feature released to beta testers now has Event Tracking. This allows you to tag Objects on your site. Picture an object as selected elements of your page you with to track its activity. This can be ideal on AJAX and Flash elements; you can place this on an AJAX step by step process, a file download, streaming webcast video, tutorial videos, etc. With these objects you assign Actions that are done on you defined objects. These can be: play, pause, stop in videos and you can even set video playing percent timelines. This can give analytics a whole new insight into user behavior data that can be translated into improvement of a better user experience, better site conversion.

The Limitations of Web Analytics

A common limitation with many free analytics packages is they can only track all numbers as the page loads, either reading server logs or using page tagging often with JavaScript but can also be done with small pixel images.

Each tracking technique has their own advantages and limitations, server logs have the limitations of recording various people using the same IP address like in a corporate network. Several people may be visiting a site but it may appear on the server logs to be one person. JavaScript tagging can take advantage of browser cookies thus being able to determine if a visit is unique based on the unique browser cookie even if the IP addresses are all the same. Although many anti-spyware, anti-adware software have also cookie cleaners that can clean out cookies and skew other analytics reports. This is unavoidable but can be minimized as much as possible. Many modern day analytics platforms use a combination of all tracking techniques.

Hits to a website give you limited knowledge of other activities, with the new Event Tracking, this will bring a new light into the interpretation of data.

Other Advanced Analytics Platforms

I still remember HitBox that became HBX that was then purchased by Visual Sciences and became one of the biggest competitors of Omniture. Then, Omniture bought Visual Sciences and that acquisition was finalized earlier this year. So far Omniture is known to be one of the most advanced analytics platforms being able to track almost anything on a page.

But as Google’s free Analytics platform that had its beginnings from starting with the purchase of Urchin, and just kept getting better might be able to put Omniture out of business don’t you think? Maybe some people might think of that. But personally, for a big company like Omniture, I doubt Google Analytics will kill Omniture, it might kill their platform, but the business can still exist as many website owners cannot understand the numbers right away and may need from help from a specialist to digest the information into usable data for important business decisions.

Yahoo Bought IndexTools and Microsoft Bought Gatineau

And of course if Google is improving, Yahoo and Microsoft are also improving. Yahoo has purchased IndexTools which is not only a web analytics platform, but also a bid management tool as well. Currently their site looks is closed for new customers right after Yahoo announced the purchase and you cannot signup anywhere so we really don’t know if this will be a paid service or dive into the free analytics world like what Google does. I do envision this to be rebranded with Yahoo colors and probably implement the unified Yahoo account login just like all other Yahoo properties. And Microsoft has purchased Gatineau and is now called Microsoft AdCenter Analytics. This is accessible through Microsoft’s AdCenter thus you just have to sign up an account with them and you’re good to go.

Bookmark to:

Related SEO Blog Post

• February 15, 2008 -- 4 SEO Solutions For Flash (14)
• April 10, 2009 -- Measuring the Search Cycle: How to Improve the ROI of Search (4)
• February 13, 2009 -- Google Announces New SEO Tool to Stop Duplicate Content Problems! (4)
• January 2, 2009 -- 10 SEO Tips from Google’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (5)
• November 17, 2008 -- SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content (3)

Many of us has seen a website with Adobe® Flash®. It has attracted many website surfers every since Macromedia came out first with Shockwave® and then create a more lightweight version for the web, Flash. It’s main strength is the animation capabilities along with a strong scripting language that seems no one else on the market has matched . With the lack of competition and a superb product, it is supported by almost every browser and operating system with many third-party add-on tools made by several companies. It’s no surprise to see many sites using Flash these days.

But the problem is, Flash, just like images and videos, these are not made in a plain text language embedded within the HTML code using tags. A browser plug-in is used here that needs to be installed at least once in order for the web browsers to display Flash websites properly. With current day bandwidth standards this just takes a few minutes or even seconds.

Flash is in a binary file format, not in plain text which makes it more difficult to consistently or not possible at all for some search engines to extract the content found within a Flash file.

Do SEO professionals hate Flash?

Depends on who you are asking, I have heard many people in the SEO industry that just hate Flash period! Just because they claim these sites cannot be search engine optimized. The feeling can be mutual from some of the web design and development community that loves Flash and AJAX and just hates SEO (watch related funny videos).

Flash and AJAX are two technologies that enhance the user experience on a website and these technologies are going to stay here for a long time. Thus should be embraced by the SEO community and learn all the workarounds on how to implement a successful SEO campaign running AJAX or Flash. If your SEO analyst simply tells you do not use Flash, they just might not really know what to do with it.

SEO Solutions in using Flash

Below I will mention 4 solutions on how to optimize your website well even if they are running Adobe Flash. Since Flash cannot be interpreted perfectly and consistently by search engines, you run into 2 main problems. First is [1] the important text content rendered in Flash cannot be read well by the search engines and second is [2] navigational elements within Flash cannot be crawled by search engine spiders. Having this in mind, here are four tips on how to implement SEO successfully on a Flash website.

1. The Non-Flash Site Version for Sites Completely Made in Flash
   Content: If your website is made all in Flash and has no other HTML elements except the code that embeds the Flash file(s), making another website with the exact look and feel (for branding purposes) but does not have all the bells and whistles of Flash will make the content readable by search engine. Since this is like totally having a separate website, you would really expect the non-Flash website generating the search engine traffic, which will then funnel visitors through the navigation leading them into the Flash website.
   Navigation: Since there is a separate website with different pages targeted for different keywords, search engine crawlers will have the opportunity to see the links and follow them in the non-Flash plain HTML website and getting all pages included in the search engine index. With the nature of Flash, similar to AJAX, where each page view may not necessarily load a new HTML page with a new URL, it would still be best to create a unique URL for each “Flash view” that will be the entry point page from the non-flash pages. And once they arrive at the page, it can load the same Flash file and no need to reload a new page.
   

   In the image above, users aware of the website already will normally enter the page through the flash version of the website. And once on the homepage, the URL will no longer change although the “Flash Views” that serve like pages in the perspective of the user will change.

   On the other side of the story, Search engines will crawl the plain HTML version of the site. Which can generate traffic going to the HTML pages once these pages are ranking with proper SEO practices. And each page will have the option for the user to see the flash version that lies on it’s own unique URL and loading the same Flash file but going straight to the appropriate Flash view.

   Advantage: You can design your Flash as intricate you want. No limitations since the SEO’d pages are on the non-Flash website.
   Disadvantage: You need to spend more time and resources making the website. Having a Flash and non-Flash website is having two websites to maintain. More time, more resources, more money spent.
   Quick Tip: Flash can input data from XML documents relatively easy. Server-side scripting languages such as PHP, JSP, ASP, etc. can also import data from XML documents. Creating a unified CMS should make life easier in the long run, but may take more time to set up.

2. Alternative Content and Navigation
   Content: On the same page where Flash is displayed, somewhere else on your screen real estate some equivalent content of what was found within the flash file is also presented outside of Flash as plain text within the HTML code.
   Navigation If a navigational element was made in Flash, similar to the content, adding another alternative navigation on the site will help get all other pages crawled and index in the search engines. A common implementation of this is having footer text links at the bottom of every page.
   Advantage: Unlike the technique above, you do not need to make another website. Just make sure whatever text content you have on your flash file. Have it available elsewhere on the page outside of Flash.
   Disadvantage: Cannot be done on a full Flash website, but generally any website implementing SEO should not have a full Flash website.
   Quick Tip: Flash should be used best here for areas where you want to attract attention. Perfect for your unique selling statement, current product or service promotions. Whatever content was found here should also found elsewhere in a plain text format for the search engines to read. The animation is mainly used to draw the attention (not to annoy) of a user to read and pay attention to the Flash and hopefully draw in the user to read and explore further.
3. sIFR for Flash Designed Text
   Content: Text font designs used on websites are declared either in the non-standard HTML font tag or in the declared font styles using CSS. Either way, these layout commands are telling the web browser to load the font file available on the viewer’s local computer. In the absence of these font files, the browser will load it’s default browser fonts that is often Times New Roman. This limited web designers to use commonly installed fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva, Courier, Times New Roman, and other common fonts decreasing the creative freedom of many web designers. So in order to design beautiful typefaces, you can either use an image or Flash but search engines had trouble reading these. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement or simply sIFR (many pronounce this is as sifer) is an effective use of Flash text replacement. This is similar to how CSS image text replacement is done, just done in Flash. What makes this even better than CSS image text replacement is sIFR can be used more effectively in CMS applications since both can be easily generated dynamically. Although an image with text written on the image can be done dynamically also with tools such as PHP’s GD library, it is not as easy nor resource friendly as sIFR.
   Navigation: The text on any anchor link is important in SEO for this is what gives meaning to what the destination page is all about. The important keywords within the a tags are your targeted keywords. But if the link is applied on a image or a Flash file, you have to make sure the targeted keywords are still read by search engines. In images you use the alt attributes. Since sIFR is used to ‘stylize‘ text and not for any other animated effect, sIFR is idea to add beautiful looking text links not sacrificing the crawlability of the links.
   Advantage: Ability to create styled text font faces that are completely viewable as plain text in the “eyes” of the search engines. sIFR is very lightweight and scalable. Relatively easy to implement and Google has expressed their acceptance of this method. sIFR also downgrades gracefully if Flash is disabled or not installed on a web browser.
   Trivia: Inman is the last name of Shaun Inman that first to experiment with Javascript code used in sIFR. This was then modified and improved by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben so that is can be used to replace HTML text elements.
   
4. Use SWFObject
   Content: Probably something you have heard quite often if you have been keeping up-to-date with the latest SEO techniques and those who were not able to fully catch up may think this technology is so confusing. To explain this further, let’s explain how Flash is added to a webpage. Normally, Flash will have HTML object and embed tags. Within these tags is the source of the Flash file with the .swf file name extension along with several parameters how this .swf file is displayed such as the height, width and more. The SWFObject is a Javascript function that detects if Flash is available. As mentioned on Geoff Stearns website:

   SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

   Since this is mainly a Flash detection script and it replaces HTML blocks such as a typical div tag, plain text HTML content can be placed within the div tag. And only if Flash is enabled will it display the Flash over the div tag. A simple code implementation would look like this:

   In the section, the SWFObject is called.

   script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfobject.js”/script

   Also in the head or optionally in the body you have the SWFObject call stating the .swf file to load.

   script type=”text/javascript”
   var so = new SWFObject(“flashfile.swf”, “flashheader”, “400″, “200″, “8″, “#ffffff”);
   so.write(“flashcontent”);
   /script

   This will then look for the element with the ID flashcontent and replace it with the .swf file flashfile.swf. And anywhere within the webpage’s content, you can have:

   div id=”flashcontent”
   Text here, placed within these tags are search engine friendly. And can be read by search engines.
   /div

   This script mainly checks the browser’s Flash capability, since search engine spiders are not Flash enabled, thus Flash does not run. Aside from that, JavaScript is used to invoke Flash and search engines are not JavaScript enabled either. But since the content of the Flash file is displayed as plain text beneath the Flash in a div tag, search engines are able to read the content you gave of that Flash file.
   Navigation: In the same way how the content is replaced with Flash, navigational elements work exactly the same way. Having plain text HTML links within the Flash-replaced div tag.
   Advantage: Can work with full Flash sites and websites that have only portions of it in Flash. Full Flash sites can degrade normally into non-Flash sites without having the need for a visitor to choose which site version to view. Flash page URLs and non-Flash page URLs are unified into a single URL.
   Disadvantage: Very easy to implement shady to dark blackhat techniques with keyword stuffing behind the flash that can get you banned in the search engine. Although this is easily avoidable by simply not putting any content on the plain text HTML code that is not visible on the Flash file. As long as you keep it clean, you are safe. In Goggle’s Adam Lasnik’s own words in an interview by Eric Enge, he states:

   I haven’t happened to catch any of the SWFObject based flash sites, so, I can’t give a definite answer on that one, but the key thing here is that if the text that is essentially gracefully rendered outside of the flash for those who don’t have it, is identical to what folks that do have flash capabilities in their browser are seeing, then generally there is not going to be a problem.

   Trivia: SWFObject used to be called FlashObject. The name was changed due to legal/trademark reasons.

Do I block my Flash files?

Google has been showing their advancements in reading .swf files. Google can actually go into a .swf file and extract the text it can find within this file. Although it may not be a wise decision to let Google index your Flash files.

Above is a sample .swf file indexed by Google on a popular website. The title is totally meaning less and so is the description. And if ever someone does visit this Flash file, it won’t lead the visitor to the rest of the site. Google is indeed doing good in reading Flash files but in my opinion it is still not the right time to let Google index your Flash files as you cannot optimize them as well as you can with HTML pages. If visitors check the Flash file, you have a smaller chance into making them visit the rest of the site. And so far I believe it is only Google that has this capability and it is nice to still be search engine friendly to all major search engines. To solve this issue, you can simply place all .swf files in one folder and block them off in robots.txt.

Disallow: /swf/

In a nutshell, Flash is ideal for certain areas where you want to attract attention. Possibly highlighting some promo or doing a call to action. Blinking and jerky movements have been proven not effective and is more annoying. With Flash elements on a page, make sure you have alternative content and navigation for search engines to read.

• If you have a full Flash website, you can either has a complete non-Flash version or degrade gracefully using SWFObject./li>
• If you are just using Flash for small banner type purposes, you can simply serve alternative plain text content and navigation elsewhere on the page, or use SWFObject.
• For style font headings, with total font design freedom, sIFR would be the best way to do it.

If you are unsure how to implement all of these, leave a comment and ask us questions to clarify your thoughts.

Adobe®, Flash® and Shockwave® are tradenames of Adobe Corporation.

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• November 17, 2008 -- SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content (3)
• May 21, 2008 -- Track AJAX and Flash Actions with Google Analytics Event Tracking (0)
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• December 14, 2007 -- More Tips About Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the No Script Tag (0)

The content inside the no script tag (which looks like <”noscript”> <”/noscript”> but without the quotes) is invisible to browser users who have Java script enabled. Those users will be able to use the AJAX application as intended. But for users for do not have Java script turned on (like search engine spiders), the content that exists in the no script tag is visible. You should format it the same way you would normal html.

It’s really important to understand that this tool has the capacity to get you in trouble for spamming. Don’t use this tool for that purpose. The only content that should ever be contained in no script tag, is content that users with Java script turned on would be able to see. Don’t ever put anything in the no script tag that doesn’t exist on the page for all users. In other words, don’t cram a bunch of spam links in the noscript tag that are not representative of the links found in your AJAX.

Incidentally, the no script tag works great for old school pull down java script jump menus that search engines can’t normally see. This will really help you if your primary navigation is a jump menu (I don’t recommend that but I see it all the time). Navigation links in general have a big effect on your search listings if your links are keyword focused. So implementing this tag on all your Java navigation links will open those links to the search engines for the first time.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, using a noscript tag makes a lot of sense also because it keeps your content aligned with your link popularity and Page Rank metrics (versus creating an alternative set of Web pages that won’t have the same link connectivity).

Stay tuned because Benj will have another great article soon about SEO friendly Flash.

Have a great weekend.

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• November 17, 2008 -- SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content (3)
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What is AJAX?

AJAX is a term coined publicly by Jesse James Garrett of AdaptivePath meaning: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. As posted on Wikipedia:

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The main intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.

AJAX is asynchronous in that extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers. There is, however, no requirement that the asynchronous content be formatted in XML.

AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Keeping the technical language to a minimum, the main observable benefit you have in running AJAX is having dynamic content load on your page without having the whole page to reload on a new URL. This gives you the benefit to only reload certain parts of a page making the resources load to a minimum aside from having it visually appealing to the user.

Problem 1: SEO Issues with Dynamic Content of AJAX

Search engines crawl websites using bots that are also called crawlers or spiders. These are nothing but programs that visit webpages on the Internet looking at all links and further visiting every valid link found crawlable. And content on the page is read and associated to the URL crawled.
Having that behavior, search engines will only be able to read the initially loaded content when the URL of the page is loaded. Any other content that loads by AJAX requiring a user click or some other event may not be read by the search engines.
Probably a good example of an AJAX site would be the Instant Domain Search. For every letter you type, new content is loaded. It loads fast and is appealing to people as they do not need to wait for a full page reload. Although all generated new content cannot be read by search engines.

Problem 2: Search Engine Crawling Problems of AJAX

Since search engines crawl websites looking at every link found on a page, search engines may not be able to check links going to other pages of an AJAX webpage. First of all, AJAX content does not need to reside on a different URL, it will have the same URL as how it loaded.
Normally a link going to a normal webpage may look like this:

• <a href=”path/page.html”>text to click on</a>

And AJAX powered sites may have links in various forms like:

• <a href=”javascript: functioname(content-parameter);”>text to click on</a>
• <a href=”#content-parameter”>text to click on</a>
• <a href=”javascript: void();” onclick=” functioname(content-parameter);”>text to click on</a>
• <a href=” #” onclick=” functioname(content-parameter);”>text to click on</a>

Having your href value not a valid webpage will just be disregarded by search engines, even if you do have a way to let search engines see the dynamically loaded content, this will still be on the same URL where it has to really be separated.
For my example of this, let me show you the AJAX Powered Agile Photo Gallery. Their demo page shows one URL and that URL will never change when you view the other photos or check the other pages. Their link format uses a JavaScript function right in the href value of the link.

Problem 3: Placing All Content On One Page Dilutes Keyword Focus

Instead of dynamically loading all content from a server-side scripting language or XML file, some people just place all content upfront and use JavaScript tricks to hide and display text. This may solve the problem of problem 1 issue mentioned above since there is no other content to crawl. And, in a way, solves the issue of problem 2 since there are no other links needed to be crawled. But, even if it solves these issues, the new problem of keyword focus arises.
Check the site of the popular Moofx All their main pages are all on one page and if you click on the bars, the content gracefully slides and, in reality, all content is already there and is not loading for every click on the page links. The content is just hidden using CSS and/or JavaScript techniques. In the case of Moofx it is not much of a big issue, but on other corporate sites with pages of various topics that should stand alone on their own page, this technique may not be ideal as the various keywords get all mixed up and loses keyword focus on a page.

Problem 4: Search Engines Spiders Do Not Read JavaScript Code

Depending on how your AJAX developer makes your web pages, they can make content being written by JavaScript or not. And, while it would be ideal to keep JavaScript to dynamically changing visual components of a page, it is not ideal to have JavaScript write the content itself using a document.write function. As much as possible, content and links of a webpage should be plain HTML text as much as possible. Search engines simply disregard the content written within the JavaScript code.

The SEO Solution to the AJAX Problems

Solution 1: Serve Alternative Content

On a single page, if a navigational element is written by AJAX on every page load and is wrapped up in JavaScript, a solution can be having some alternative navigation on the page. Using footer links on a page for instance will work.
And for these alternative links, these should lead to actual pages on their own URLs that would load the same content as what would load in the AJAX links.
This way you please users with the visual appeal of AJAX and you still give alternative navigation and content that search engines can read and index. Where, if people get to visit these URLs, they will still be drawn to the AJAX pages.

Solution 2: Using Hijax – Graceful Degredation of AJAX

A concept first mentioned by Jeremy Keith of Clear:Left has an excellent presentation on this. His technique goes into the specific details of how AJAX should be written so that it degrades well with less AJAX capable browsers. In the same way Search Engines behave, just like a less capable browser. Here are some examples of his unobtrusive JavaScript example from his presentation:

• JavaScript pseudo-protocol – Awful!
  <a href=”javascript:window.open(‘help.html’)”>contextual help</a>
• Pointless link – Bad!
  <a href=”#” onclick=”window.open(‘help.html’); return false;”>contextual help</a>
• Using the DOM – Better.
  <a href=”help.html” onclick=”window.open(this.getAttribute(‘href’)); return false;”>contextual help</a>
• No inline JavaScript – Best!
  <a href=”help.html” class=”help”>contextual help</a>

He also talks about externalizing JavaScript and CSS code. Another major advantage of having a gracefully degrading AJAX website is not having the need to create alternative content. It is simply having only one content source that degrades well when JavaScript is disabled which is mainly how search engine spider behaves, like browsers with JavaScript disabled. One of the perfect examples I have seen implementing SEO friendly AJAX using Hijax techniques is on AjaxOptimize.

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