One of the things that I notice about a lot of Web Design firms and even creative agencies who say they bake SEO into everything they do, is that very few of them bake it into there own sites. Now I don’t want to call anyone out today but I do want to give people a quick little guide on the top five things to look for when evaluating the SEO ability of design firm that says they know SEO. I mean, if SEO is part of their overall offering, they would be silly not to SEO their own site right? And if they haven’t taken the time to do that, is that a firm that you can really feel confident in? I think you know my answer. *lol* So here is the top 5 things that I would look for in a design firms web site that will give you some idea if they know what they are doing:

1) Are their page titles unique on every page and are they keyword focused. If you see a site with Page Titles like “About Us – Company Name”, they have not been optimized. Page Titles should read like intelligent sentences or phrases and convey as much information about the content of the page as possible. If you see short page titles that lack keyword focus in relation to the content that is on the page, that’s a sure sign that the optimization skills of this company are lacking.

2) Are all their pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN? Many times if a site is dynamic or has extra long URL strings with too many parameters, search engines can have some difficulty indexing pages. Doing a site:www.domain.com search on the company URL can tell you if the pages you see on the Web site are indexed. If they are not, or there are issues with duplicate content where content is indexed, your company might not be the best option for SEO.

3) And speaking of dynamic URL strings, if your design firm has you using URLs that are a mile long with more than 4 or 5 parameters, you want to recheck #2 to see if those pages are indexed. Google does fairly well with long URL strings nowadays although they are inconsistent at best. The other engines are farther behind in their ability to understand and rank these types of pages. So it’s best to be on the safe side and have URL strings which are as short and easy to understand as possible.

4) Flash – While there have been a lot of advancements over the last year in SEO, it is still not recommended that your site be completely based in Flash. Usability and accessibility concerns aside, unless your design team has a specific solution to optimize your Flash, like using FlashObject or one of the other Flash Solutions that Benj has recommended, your SEO millage may vary. And if they put your primary navigation for your site in Flash with no alternative way for spiders to see it, you have clearly found someone who does not have a SEO.

5) JavaScript – Again, if the entire site navigation is built in JavaScript with no alternative text link navigation or noscript tag, odds are the company in question has a very limited understanding of SEO.

Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than these five issues. But these are pretty easy to spot and can be a quick clue as to the relative sophistication level of your Web design firm or creative agency as it relates to SEO. If they don’t offer SEO as part of their services, then these types of issues may be expected. But if they do offer SEO and these issues exist, it might be time to re-evaluate whether or not you want to engage that company for SEO work.

I hope that helps a few people in their decision making process. Have a great week!

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• November 24, 2008 -- 3 SEO Basic Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Today! (6)
• November 17, 2008 -- SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content (3)
• May 21, 2008 -- Track AJAX and Flash Actions with Google Analytics Event Tracking (0)
• February 15, 2008 -- 4 SEO Solutions For Flash (14)
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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.

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• January 2, 2009 -- 10 SEO Tips from Google’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (5)
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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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I really think that 2008 is going to be the year that you see the study of Web site Usability move to the forefront of Search Engine Optimization. If your not familiar with Usability, here is a really good definition that we like to use here at BusinessOnLine:

“After all, usability really just means that making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing – whether it’s a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door – for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.” – Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think, 2000, p. 5

If you would like more information about Usability, I have two great resources for you. The first is a list of articles by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who is considered one of the foremost authorities in the world on the subject. The second is to check out the blog of my co worker, Usability consultant Thanh Nguyen who is one of the most passionate people in the business. Fortunately for me, I have the opportunity to get her input on all our SEO solutions to make sure that we don’t sacrifice user experience for the sake of optimization. But aside from Usability concerns, which should almost always take precedence, it also makes a lot of sense from an SEO perspective to ensure that you always put the user first.

Search engine optimization encompasses many different variables. Search engines use things like links, content, meta data, server settings and other variables to try to determine how relevant a document is to a particular query. But as search engine technology advances, more and more variables that try to quantify positive user experience will be integrated into the search algorithms. Google wants to provide the best site to its users for any given search. Doing so ensures that the searcher will continue to use their search product. The word “best” is subjective and Google uses various signals like the variables mentioned earlier to help it determine which site really is “best” for a given user. And certainly part of the word “best” will encompass user experience. And therefore, having a site that provides a superior user experience will benefit a site’s search engine rankings. Whether it’s a time on site variable, positive references from social bookmarking and social sharing sites or just the propensity of quality sites to link to your site based on its excellent usability, there are a number of ways that usability already affects search rankings. And as technology advances, more metrics will be developed which will continue to make Usability a key ingrediant in the any successful SEO campaign.

In the meantime, I thought it would be a good idea to get together with Thanh and put together a top 5 list of ways that Usability and SEO can work together to not only enhance user experience, but increase search engine visibility as well. My thanks to Thanh for taking the time to help me put this list together:

1) #1 Don’t Use Flash or Java Script Based Site Navigation

Usability:
- Users without this technology cannot navigate your Web site (although according to Adobe 99% of users have Flash).
- Slow loading times for users without broadband Internet connections.
- Flash disables back button functionality.
- Bad for accessibility.

SEO:
- Search engines cannot see these links and therefore they will not contribute to your Internal Link Popularity, Page Reputation or Page Rank.

Instead use CSS or a No Script Tag for Java Script Based Navigation.
Use SWFObject for Flash Based Navigation

#2) Internet Architecture Should Be Keyword Focused

Usability:
- Your Navigation and Content Categories should closely align with the keywords that people are most often using when searching for your products, services or information.
- This improves the ability of users to find the information they need which not only improves their trust in your Web site but also increases conversions.

SEO:
- Increases the amount of keyword focused internal links.
- A link is considered a vote (even if its from your own site) that the page that is being linked to is important for the keywords that are contained within the link text.

#3) Images Should Have Keyword Focused Descriptive Alt Text

Usability:
- Users with disabilities, screen readers or that use browser with images disabled, will still be able to navigate the site in the event your images are linked.
- Additionally this user group will benefit from Alt text on non linked images because often times images convey a lot of important information that is necessary for the user to fully understand the page content.

SEO:
- Search engines use Alt text for Page Reputation (keyword relevancy) when the link is based on an image rather than text.
- Alt Text on images which are not links, helps with image optimization which is increasingly important with the advancement of universal search.

#4) Keyword Focused Breadcrumb Navigation

Usability:
- Immediately orients users to their position within the Web site in the event that a sub page is their first point of entry.
- Provide one-click access to higher site levels

SEO:
- Increases the amount of keyword focused internal links to deeper pages than the main site navigation (depending on the depth of content that the site has).
- A link is considered a vote (even if its from your own site) that the page that is being linked to is important for the keywords that are contained within the link text.

#5) Make PDF Documents Available in HTML Format

Usability:
- Users without this technology cannot understand your content.
- Don’t make your users reliant on 3rd party software in order to use your Web site or consume your information.

SEO:
- Search engines are inconsistent in their ability to understand the content within a PDF file.
- Search engines do not recognize link connectivity data within PDF Documents.
- More HTML pages equals more Page Rank.

New Year Bonus #6) Keyword Focused Title Tags

Usability:
- Your Page Titles should closely align with the keywords that people are most often using when searching for your products, services or information.
- This improves the ability of users to understand that your Web site has the information that they are looking for and therefore also increases search engine result click through rates.

SEO:
- Page Titles are still one of the most heavily weighted variables in the search engine algorithms for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

These six best practices are great for both SEO and Usability. And, if you do SEO for a living, being able to explain that these practices help Usability as well as SEO, increases the value of your services. Usability and SEO working together is an essential part of good SEO and the more SEO professionals familiarize themselves with the basic principles of Usability, the more effective their optimization skills will be.

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