Great Resource For SEO Flash Tips

A great article by Johnathan Hochman mention the issues that are faced when attempting to search engine optimize a flash based web page. His article brings up the important fact while there are ways to alternatively display text to search engines while displaying flash to visitors, it can be misconstrued by them and your site could be penalized. So what should one do in this instance?

<h2>Proper Use Of Flash Content</h2>

Flash has a different level of prominence depending on what industry is employing it. It is essential for those in photography, film, and music to employ a simple effective solution for clients to view their work. Flash is an excellent solution for this endeavor. Most other industries do not have as much of a use for it on a large application basis. It can be the perfect sales tool if you have a build to suit type product, and you want them to be able to build there customized product on your website. It is also great for walk through diagrams of a product. Other than that, it is best to utilize flash conservatively.

3 Do Not Do Tips For Using Flash

Do not use flash as the navigation bar for every page (drop down menus!!!). If the user does not have a flash plugin they cannot navigate the site. It will also stop search search engine from navigating your site properly.
Do not use it as an animated logo on every page. Regardless of what you may think, the user does not need to see a shiny widget in the corner at all times. It distracts them from what you really want them to be doing.
Do not use flash as a static image with background sound. As a general rule, you do not want automated sounds playing on your website. It can scare someone who has their volume up, and can annoy others.

Quote from craigslist

“There’s a reason REAL Seo’s charge $125/hr and up.
We know what we’re doing.

1) Your own site is generated by WordPress. A FREE blogging tool
2) “all in one SEO pack” is a free addon for wordpress. it doesnt count as legitimate SEO. I use it. its nice, but not for business use.
3) you have 19+ xhtml warnings and invalidity. ranging from malformed tags to proprietary tags, on just the homepage..
4) you’re text overlaps in your video section. you might want to consult a designer.
5) your own site doesnt have pagerank
6) you have an alexa rank of 14 MILLION, you wont even show up on the first 5 pages unless you have a rank of under 2m
7) Snakeoil SEO’s like you give REAL Seo’s like me a bad name. people don’t trust us anymore.
your domain is longer than 12 characters. typically that’s too long for the avg user to remember.
9) it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to get any page rank in days.
10) your site’s linking structure uses ID’s and not keyword based text strings. SE’s have no use for that.

please, don’t lie to people. you’re clearly not better, nor can you rank in DAYS.
checkout seomoz or something like that to learn some better technique.
i may seem to come off harsh, but its quite irritating to earn a living when everyone undercuts your price, screws up a potential client, and then the client doesn’t want to have anything to do with our services anymore.

the reason i charge $125/hr is because i will monitor several ranges of traffic, manage keywords, placement, and site programming. SEO is a service, not a 1 time product.
goodluck to you and your business. ”

Our Response Post

Hello,
We are a small startup SEO business in the orlando area. We are looking to trade office space for SEO services on a regular basis. We can deliver what you are looking for. We have the skills and knowledge to get you ranked or we will let you know in advance. I felt that is was a bit amusing that another SEO company in the area decided to take the time to try a discredit us, so I decided to quote the post here. I figured I would like you to make an informed decision. In the quoted post above there are several statements. Some true, some not. All the ones relating to our website are true. We are not web designers (though we know some great ones that we can use to complete your project under our supervision). We can build a website for you in exchange for office space, but it will be a simple clean site similar to ours. We will use a wordpress or joomla system to do so. These are content management systems which will allow you to update your site without an expensive web master every time you want to post a picture. The gentlemen who posted this negative comment mentions pagerank. What he means by “page rank” is that Google ranks sites on the internet on a credibility scale using a number 0-10 10 being the best. A very credible site would be a three or higher. Our website has a pagerank of zero. It has that because it is about 3 weeks old, and you cannot force pagerank. It take time to get. No getting around it. He refers to “alexa rank” as well. Alexa is a company that ranks all the indexed pages on the web in order of popularity. really anything under a million and the Alexa rank is pretty much meaning less. Again, it is very difficult to develop a high alexa rank in a manner of weeks. Also, we have been developing our small roster of clients sites instead of our own. He mentions our domain being longer than 12 characters. We wanted something called url relevancy. That means Google looks at our site and see’s what our site is about in the domain. If you have been promoting your site for years and it is huge, this is irrelevant, but if you are a small business trying to rank you law firm it is invaluable. Also we are targeting those searching on the web that will not have to type our domain anyways. We use a seperate simple small domain for business cards. It redirects to our main site. I will not explain the last comment on the list because it is simply false. More importantly, we are simply an effective group that has not been around long enough to have a long track record. Call us, ask us to prove what we can do, and we will. No smoke and  mirrors.

We love these types of posts, because they give us  a chance to do what no one else in our business does. Take responsibility for our work. We will be posting the progress of the site periodically so everyone can watch its growth. This is a totally new site. The domain was just registered yesterday. In a matter of weeks the site will begin to have steady traffic, and within 2 months, are target is 1000 unique targeted visitors per day. That was quite a low number for us, but we did something a little different.  We have our work cut out for us. The site is not even live yet, has not been indexed by any major search engines, has no content, and we do not care. We know we can do it! Check back to see how it’s going.