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Internet Marketing Tips - Cadillac

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Internet Marketing Tips - Beazer HomesCompany: Cadillac

Search Engine Optimization Mistakes:

1) Use of flash as navigation

2) Use of flash to show content

Many companies like the way flash looks and some have legitimate business reasons for using flash applications. It is not our intention to label flash technology as not useful. Our comments are related strictly to search engine positioning.

The key to understanding how a website ranks is to look at your website from the search engine’s perspective. First, you have to understand how the search engines ‘read’ websites. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have programs (referred to as spiders or robots) which travel around the web following html links. Each of these search engines has its own robot, but they all follow the same rules.  For the purpose of this tip let’s look at some of these rules.

  1. Robots read the html code.
  2. Robots follow links in order to find new pages to read.
  3. Robots pass this information back to datacenters which process it and run it through an algorithm when you do a Google, Yahoo or MSN search.

Problem #1 - search engine robots see flash animations and movies like images.  They can’t read the content inside them. 

Problem #2 - they can’t read the content in the movie, and subsequently can’t follow the links. 

When we look at the Cadillac homepage, we see text and images, and buttons. When the Google robots look at it, they see one big file they can’t read -  nor index, cache, or determine if the website page is relevant for a particular search query. To Google therefore, the page doesn’t exist.

 

What should be done?
The main navigation menu should optimally utilize plain text and CSS styles. Flash can be used, sparingly, on a webpage. However, if you are using Flash in your navigation, ensure that the search engine robots have a secondary set of links they can follow. Another good practice is that all text should be broken out of the flash movie.

 

Comments
Flash is a great technology, and Macromedia is incorporating new technologies for search engine robots. However, there is always a way to get the benefit of flash across without jeopardizing your search engine rankings.