Since the day Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media) first used the term “Web 2.0″ rumors have flown faster than fact could catch up. Within weeks there were dozens of so called “definitions.” So what is Web 2.0? It’s really just a concept. Web 2.0 is the idea that the Internet can be used for bigger business than viewing simple Websites and sending email, if the right technologies are employed. Chances are you’ve been using Web 2.0 technology for a couple years already via shared multi media, social networking, and online collaboration sites.

Primary tools of Web 2.0 include video sharing sites such as YouTube; Wiki sites like Wikipedia; blogs and various “live face” technologies. We will cover 3 of the quickest, easiest ways to optimize for Web 2.0, beginning with blogs.

1.) SEO for Blogs

Optimizing a blog is one of the absolute best ways to capture Google’s most coveted top spots very quickly. You can hit number 1 on Google in a matter of days. Here’s how you do it…

a.) First, find a good blogging tool. There are plenty out there. I use WordPress (http://www.WordPress.org.) I originally picked it because it was so quick and easy to setup. And soon I realized the platform does 50% of SEO by its very nature. It’s free and you can get thousands of themes, to fit any style you wish, also for free.

b.) Next, make sure your hosting provider can support your blog. I’ve never seen one that can’t. If you are starting fresh, do a Google search for “WordPress blog hosting” and you’ll find great packages that only cost $25 for a whole year. Just avoid the freebie hosts since you are almost guaranteed to be sharing server space (and likely an IP range) with sites banned by Google, which can cost you your ranking.

c.) Once your blog app is installed, turn on the “permalink” option from the control panel. This way each posting you enter will also get its own URL. Finally, begin entering posts of 200 or more words, focusing on only 1 or 2 keywords per post. Try to begin each post title with the primary keyword for that topic.

d.) To best optimize your keywords and content follow the steps outlined in SEO cbt’s release “Google Domination” (http://www.SEOcbt.com). This is a free computer based training module for SEO do it yourselfers that works extremely well. It was not written specifically for blogs but all the information is perfectly suited to them.

Inside Tip: Register your domain name for a five year period or longer. Just extend it if needed. Google has been known to check “whois” records and assumes the longer the domain is registered in advance, the more “real” the site is.

2.) SEO for YouTube Videos

YouTube accounts for more than 60% of ALL online videos watched in the US. And your YouTube videos can be found in Google’s search results just like any normal Web page. This means they can rank number 1 in just days, with the right SEO.

If you’re looking to capitalize on SEO for Web 2.0, this is a fast and free way to do it. I won’t get into how to upload the videos and optimize the frame size, etc. That said; let’s assume you have signed up for your free account at YouTube.com and are ready to upload your first video using their easy to follow instructions. This is all the SEO you need to know…

a.) When forming your title, think in terms of “long tail” keywords, meaning keyword phrases of three or more words. Be sure these are in the same order people would search for them (eg/ “long tail keywords” not “keywords long tail.”) Also try to anticipate what the user will type in his search. “How to” is one of the most common search phrases people use in Google and YouTube to get answers quick.

b.) Think of “tags” as keywords and enter them like you would the Meta keyword tag of a web page. Select only the most likely search terms people are using and keep the words in the order people use them. Don’t just use random words separated by commas. Use full length search phrases exactly how people search for them. And don’t go too crazy here. Excessive tags tend to confuse the YouTube engine. Incidentally, if you have “how to” as a tag, also add “howto” (without the space.) If “how to” returns a bunch of unrelated junk your “howto” tag can better cut to the chase in YouTube’s search engine.

c.) The description is where you have the most freedom. It’s best to begin the description with your main keyword (and title) as close to the beginning as possible. Something like this works well… “Learn how to…” then follow up with several sentences rich in long tail keywords (the same ones from your tags.) Good grammar isn’t the biggest deal but try to make it friendly for people who might actually read the description before they decide to watch the video. Also remember that Google uses a natural text algorithm that can spot unnatural keyword spamming a mile away.

Real Life Example: I just saw a commercial on TV for a spy movie and someone threw a knife. I went to Google and entered “how to throw a knife” (without quotes.) The top three matches include a YouTube video and Wiki entry. Wow! Welcome to Web 2.0!

3.) SEO Using “Live Face” Technology

One of the biggest reasons for the dot com crash of ’01 was that Websites became way too impersonal. One of Web 2.0′s strengths is the ability to help people relate to people once again. One of the most successful technologies leading the way is “Live Face.”

Live Face allows a video spokesperson to meet, greet and inform your Web page visitors. As far as SEO benefits, any sort of video has usually involved heavy RealTime or Flash files that block search engine spiders and hurt rankings. Now however, there are services like Live Face for Web (http://www.LivefaceForWeb.com) that can add full length videos to your site without it interfering with onsite SEO one bit (due to the file’s location) while greatly enhancing offsite efforts such as acquiring the highest quality one way and reciprocal links.

Most sites employing this technology report conversion increases of up to 5x. This means they are converting up to five times the number of sales they did before using Live Face technology.

Real Life Example: The SEOcbt.com site mentioned earlier uses Live Face for Web and they hit number one on Google for all of their major keywords within two weeks of site launch.

That’s a good start to SEO for Web 2.0. Good luck!

Website designing involves a lot of crucial aspects apart from the aesthetic looks of the website. Along with creating a website design that is appealing it is also required to meet the websites business requirements. This is so that there is enough traffic that the website attracts just so that the business grows. Seo web designs offer quality and affordable web design pages that will ensure business royal customers, an excellent brand image and in turn generate conversion rates.

Increasing exposure over the internet

Professional SEO web designers will know how to give a business that looks great with optimized web design and is search engine friendly. For a business to reach out to its niche market just so that the business grows is important. A website that does not generate any traffic is basically dead to the business; this will in no way generate traffic and potential customers who can then be converted to loyal customers. With an efficiently SEO designed website it is possible to see huge traffic being attracted towards your website since on-site optimization will help place the website in the top searches in all of the search engines. This is definitely important if the business is required to make profits through selling its services and products.

Affordable

The website owner can take several approaches that will help increase the on-site optimization by increasing the visibility of the web page. There are several options to choose from like Pay per Click options, Google Adwords, Charge per Click etc. with these options it is possible for an SEO web design page to make an exceptionally great profit all at a remarkably affordable approach that will also stand the test of times for years to come.

Increasing business efforts

If a particular service or product is being sold via a website, then SEO web designed pages that speak of the particular service or product is generally helpful to draw the attention of the viewer and the buyer. For E.g. if you are into tourism and have a website; it is always an advantage to have articles that have the right sales pitch to promote your service. With optimized web design this can be achieved at a much affordable rate.

Reaching out

With a Seo web designed page it is possible to reach out to a much larger audience, and attract viewers thereby creating your own niche in the marketing space. This is a relatively low cost investment for benefits that are potentially high especially if the SEO website design is done in the right way that includes all the intricacies of increasing traffic and loyal customers. This is a kind of advertisement over the internet and unlike other advertisements you do not have to shell out huge amounts of money to reach out to a large audience base.

With an efficiently SEO designed website you will get the best from your online business. This is because SEO realizes the fact that the internet users are only multiplying with the passage of time, and with optimized organic search rankings in most of the search engines it is much easier to create a market base.

Google has recently launched it’s new social networking initiative called as Google Buzz. It is already present inside Gmail and one does not have to register anew for it. This master stroke instantly gave Google over 40 million users for Buzz. Compared to launching a brand new platform like wave, this is integrated inside gmail and thus already inside the users email inbox.

In buzz, a user can post pictures, videos, text, etc. They can like and comment on other user posts like in Facebook. In the first 56 hours of its launch, google claimed that over 160000 posts were made on an average every hour. Why should Facebook and Twitter worry? Well, Twitter should worry because this service is more similar to it than to Facebook. And also because gmail.com has more traffic than twitter.com has. Once you start using buzz, it automatically makes you follow some of your contacts and vice versa. Initially there were some privacy issues because many people use gmail for business correspondence and would not want business associates to pry into their private life via buzz. But google is addressing these issues speedily and giving options to turn off buzz or remove people you don’t to follow, etc. If public start using buzz regularly, the potential is huge.

It has the backing of a giant company which is lagging behind in the social networking arena and wants to gain lost ground. If users demand certain features, the company can work fast and incorporate the same. Google just needs to ensure that people keep on using buzz. It also needs a better public interface like Twitter has. Acquiring a polished and more refined look and feel will take some time. The theory is people are using facebook and twitter a lot. Now, if they also start using buzz, it will mean that they go less to the other two sites. You waste only a certain time every day on something. You replace one activity with another.

In conclusion, facebook and twitter already know that they have been attacked with buzz and I am sure that they are taking some steps to protect their ground.

No web site will appear at the top of a search result by accident. Most sites get to the top with the aid of search engine optimization (SEO). This is a systematic method of increasing a site’s rank in search results, by recognizing and using the most searched for key words or phrases in relation to that industry. Online marketing firms working on behalf of organizations who wish to raise their exposure perform SEO.

Sadly, most service providers do not educate the clients as to the techniques they are using, probably as a precaution – to keep retaining their business.  Here, we will provide you with some basic instructions on how to optimize search engines.

Start small and build up your results over time. Instead of targeting a broad range oft keywords first, start with a few keywords you know you know will rank higher.

Bold and use italics on links that are important. This provides a clue to engines that this is of more importance.  Summarize.  Start and end by highlighting the keywords in a few short sentences.

When a word is reparative readers become frustrated and many search engines disregard the site. As a good practice use a keyword 4 to 6 times in one posting – this is more than sufficient to get Google’s attention.

Build a solid link and internal web structure within your site, so that it would be more attractive to viewers.

Include a “Share this” button with every post. This does not directly contribute to search engine optimization; indirectly it increases performance on search engines. This will allow visitors to share any interesting information in post with their friends immediately.

Google optimization is one of the most critical factors for search engine optmisation campaign. Google is above all the search engines. Google is based on the key factors as the Google page rank, the renowned Google sand box and inbound links.

Google optimization depends on the three key factors, Google page rank, Google sand box and the inbound links. In the process of optimizing a website you should always see the inbound links pointing to your website domain and pages. Google makes all the difference with the quality of one way inbound links. So you should concentrate on getting quality inbound links for your website. This can be done by article writing, buying links and link exchanges. With the quality inbound links your page rank will increase by itself.

The effect of Google sandbox is on the new domain names and holds them in a filter. Generally all domain names are not held in the filter. Normally by using competitive keywords, adding relevant content and linking external sites to yours can get you out of the Google sand box. One needs to keep patience in such a situation and keep on working according to Google guidelines.

There are certain guidelines for Google optimization.

1. Always defining a clear navigation structure for the website. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
2. Create a sitemap to your users with links that point to all parts of your site. Create a useful, information-rich site with pages that clearly and accurately describe the content about your services.
3. Add the words in the content users would type to find the pages.
4. Always try to use alt text instead of images to display important keywords, contents or links.
5. Make sure that your title and alt tags are relevant, descriptive and accurate.
6. Keep the links on your pages to less than 100. Get other relevant sites link to yours. Manually submit your site to directories and search engines.
7. Submit your site to Google. http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
8. Submit an xml site map file at Google webmaster tools. Google uses sitemap file to learn about the structure and coverage of your site.
9. Submit your site to relevant directories such as open directory project and yahoo directory as well as to other industry specific expert sites.
10. Upload the robot.txt file on your web browser. This file tells crawlers which directories can or can not be crawled.
11. Use robot.txt to prevent crawling of search result pages or other auto generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
12. Make pages for users, not for search engines.
13. Avoid “doorway” pages with little or no original content.

Some of the don’ts for Google optimization are.

1. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
2. Don’t link to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking and PR may be affected adversely by those links.
3. Never participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or Page Rank.
4. Don’t use hidden text or hidden links on your site.
5. Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
6. Never send automated queries to Google.
7. Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. This may get your site black listed in Google.
8. Don’t create pages that install viruses or Trojans.
9. Do not use unethical tricks to improve search engine rankings
10. Do not see any broken links and see site html is correct.
11. Try not to use “?” character in dynamic pages.
12. Do not use JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash as search engine spiders. This may search engine spiders create trouble crawling your web site.

Getting your blog ranked high on Google is a fantastic way to attract potential clients. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Select Your Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Choose the keywords and keyword phrases you want your blog post to rank high for on the Google search engine results page. For example, I want my blog post to rank high for the term, “blog ranked high on Google.” Currently there are approximately 286,000 pages using this term so I’ll have to do everything in my power to compete with these web pages to get my blog post on the first page of the Google results page for that term.

My keyword phrase also includes other keyword phrases like, “ranked high on Google” with about 310,000 competing pages and “high on Google” with over 71 million competing pages. Getting to the first page for these terms would be a bonus.

2. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog Title

Google pays very close attention to the words and phrases you use in your blog title. Notice how I used the term, “blog ranked high on Google” in the title of this article. It’s important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title if you want to rank high for that phrase on the Google results page.

Another reason you want to use your keyword phrase in your blog title is to give your reader an immediate understanding as to what your blog post is about. If your blog is listed at the top of the search engine results page for your keyword phrase but no one reads it, it’s of no value. Use a title that will cause people to click through to your blog post.

The New York Times creates two different titles for their articles. They use a catchy, creative or humorous title for their newspaper, and a keyword specific title for the articles and blogs they post to the Internet. They do this because people looking for jokes about the eating habits of nuns generally go to a search engine and type, “jokes about the eating habits of nuns,” not “Nuns, Buns and Puns.”

3. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog Text

Notice how the keyword phrase, “blog ranked high on Google,” is used throughout this blog post. Google pays attention to the text on a blog in order to understand what the blog post is about. Once Google comprehends the content of the blog post, it will categorize the blog based on that information. By using your keyword phrase in your text, both Google and your readers can quickly understand what your blog post is about, allowing Google to accurately categorize your blog making it easy for your clients to find.

In the past, search engine consultants encouraged writers to use their keyword phrase in the first 25 words of their text and again in the last sentence. Today, the search engines don’t seem to pay as much attention to word placement, but reader’s do.

If your article is about your keyword phrase, it’s a good idea to use it in the first and last sentence because it helps your reader quickly know what your blog post is about. It’s also a good idea to use your keyword phrase in the first sentence because that is the text that is most likely to show in the description text on the search results page.

4. Link To Your Blog With Keyword Rich Anchor Text

Get as many one-way links leading back to your blog post as possible from as many quality blogs and websites as you can. Do your best to insure that the text people click on to get back to your site includes your keywords and keyword phrases. This is known in Internet marketing circles as anchor text.

In this example I want the anchor text leading back to my blog post to have the keyword phrase, “blog ranked high on Google,” as the clickable text. The clickable text is the means by which all of those other web sites and blogs tell Google what your blog post is about.

Google provides far more weight to the theme of your blog post based on the quality and size of the sites linking back to your blog than the text on your blog. For example, if you do a Google search for the term, “click here,” you will be taken to the Adobe Reader download web page. It’s interesting to note the term “click here” doesn’t appear anywhere on that page. The reason the Adobe Reader download page comes up first for this term is because there are millions of other sites that use the anchor text, “click here,” to direct people to the Adobe Reader download page.

There are two wonderful ways to get keyword rich anchor text directing people back to your blog post. The first is to write and submit an article about your blog post to other web site and blog owners who will upload your article to their site. In return those web site and blog owners will provide you with a keyword rich anchor text link from your article back to your blog. They get great content for their web site and you get a valuable one-way link back to your blog post.

The second way is to encourage other blog owners to write about your blog post. In doing so, they are very likely to use your blog title as the anchor text leading readers back to your post. This is another reason why it’s so important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title.

5. Ask Your Readers To Digg Your Blog Post

Ask your readers to tell the rest of the world about your blog post by submitting it to one of the social bookmarking sites. They include DIGG, Stumble, Blink and many others. If the title of your blog post includes your keyword phrase, it is likely that this is how your readers will describe your blog post to the social bookmarking sites. This helps Google decide where to rank your site on the search results page.

6. Blog On A Community Site

Recognized Expert, Active Rain, and Christian Blog are all examples of niche community blog sites. Recognized Expert is a site for marketing experts, Active Rain is for real estate professionals and the Christian blog is for, you guessed it, Christians. These niche sites have tons of traffic along with the undivided attention of Google and the other search engines.

If you’re a marketing expert for example, blogging on a site like Recognized Expert will push your blog post to the top of the search results page in a matter of hours. That’s a huge reason to blog on a community site. If you wrote the same content on your own blog, it may take months to be seen by Google, and you may never get close to the first page for your keyword phrase.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the other search engines explore busy community sites for new content every few minutes. On the other hand, they visit newer and smaller sites every few months. If you’re serious about generating business from blogging, consider blogging on a topic specific community site.

Apply these six steps to every blog post you write, and you will quickly create a huge following of clients and potential clients. This is how the pro bloggers get their blogs ranked high on Google.

Does dominating Google rankings quick and easy sound too good to be true? It really isn’t. Following are a bunch of surefire SEO tips that have kept hundreds of my client’s sites on top of Google for years, with new ones every month.

There’s a lot to cover and I hate long articles that drone on so I’ll keep the info short and sweet. Let’s start with the domain name.

Domain Names

Age: Make sure your domain name is at least six months old. If it’s more than a year old, that’s even better. Google often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They use a “whois” database like the one at:

http://www.AllWhoIs.com.

Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what Google (and anyone else in the world) can instantly know about your site.

TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are “.com, .net. .org and .edu.” These get the most play in Google’s top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can imagine, with “.com” and “.edu” being the best.

Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword (and ONLY your main keyword) as a dotcom domain name with even just halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword. I’ve done it dozens of times. It’s a no brainer.

Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for branding but it can open whole new doors of opportunity for your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google treats a dash as a null value (almost like a space) and can take them or leave them with equal indifference. So if your main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a dash between each word. If that’s taken, just try one dash separating the first and second words but leave the second and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just keep trying combinations until you have one that works and scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months, you’ll have it when you want it.

Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword embedded domain name in the world will mean little if nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let’s find the best keywords possible for your site. Here’s how…

Keywords:

Keywords in Demand: Let’s snoop into Google’s keyword database and find some winners. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by desired search volume to see which words get the most searches.

Go Long: And don’t be afraid to use longer keywords as long as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash laden) domain names and even help cut back on your competition.

Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant keywords and phrases and list them in order of “Approximate Monthly Searches Performed.” You might want to paste the keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit of math so we might as well let Excel do it.

Competition:

Competition; Less is Better: “Less is better.” Well that’s the understatement of the year. But how do you know how much competition you will be up against? It’s easy. Simple division does the trick nicely. Here’s how…

Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see how many pages you will be competing against if you try to optimize for that keyword (Results 1 – 10 of about 123,000,000 for “keyword”.) Now record that number in the cell to the right of “searches performed.” You can go ahead and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the info you need have Excel divide the number of “competing pages” by the number of “searches performed.” The lower the resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of “searches performed.” This is your optimal target.

Even More: But we’re not done yet! Now find the next best two runnerup keywords and write them down in order of importance. We’ll need them soon.

Content:

The King Lives!: You’re probably sick of hearing it but content really is king. Developing search engine friendly, well optimized content (for REAL people) is key to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here’s what DOES work…

Keep it Real: Call a close friend and tell him or her exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as quick as you can write it down, as close to “word for word” as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.

Fitting In: Now, with your list of three keywords, go back through your text and fit your most important keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your third keyword should go into the beginning of the second paragraph if possible.

Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.

Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword (number 3 pick) at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at the end. This shows consistency (at least as far as Google is concerned.)

Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over the course of about 9 paragraphs.)

Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:

Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor your progress and your site’s status (how search engine REALLY see it). This will tell you not just where you are – but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week; per site!) My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

If you are a regular internet user, you would by now have heard of Google AdSense. Website owners on the other hand, would at some point of time or the other, have even tasted Google AdSense profits.

 AdSense is a very comfortable tool from Google which works in tandem with Google Ad Words to place relevant ads on your web pages. The best bet is to learn how to get money out of your US bank account while in a foreign country. A few years back, it was more difficult to get more money when you weren’t in the country.

Google AdSense profit generation explained

Google Adsense profits works on a very simple principle. Business needs advertisement and if your business is web based, your advertisements must appear on Google. Therefore, business creates advertisements and pay Google to place them alongside the search results as also websites having a partnership with Google on AdSense. Most of the advertisements adopt the pay-per-click format.

How to generate Google AdSense profits

Opening an Adsense account is your first step towards profit. Once your account is activated, you can follow the links provided by Google to complete the procedure. There are a few questions to be answered and you will need to tell Google how the ads are to be positioned on your page. When you complete the formalities, Google will provide you an HTML code to be pasted on your web site. You now start getting the advertisements and whenever someone clicks on the ads, you get your share of the booty. So simple. Get going and make the best out of Google AdSense profits – your profits.

You just go to the nearest ATM, pop your card in, and out comes the money that you need. You’ve been to ATMs in the US, so you know how they work, so operating an ATM in another country is going to be a piece of cake. What happens if you accidentally miscalculate, and that great deal on a reproduction of a Ming dynasty vase turns out to cost almost as much as a real one would? Once your account is activated, you can follow the links provided by Google to complete the procedure. There are a few questions to be answered and you will need to tell Google how the ads are to be positioned on your page.

When you complete the formalities, Google will provide you an HTML code to be pasted on your web site. For you now start getting the advertisements and whenever someone clicks on the ads, you get your share of the booty. So simple. Get going and make the best out of Google AdSense profits – your profits. You probably are going to need more money now; what happens if you don’t know how to get it? The best bet is to learn how to get money out of your US bank account while in a foreign country. A few years back, it was more difficult to get more money when you weren’t in the country. If you needed money, you would have to wait for someone to wire the money for you, and it would waste a whole day of vacation waiting in an office for your money to arrive.

It has been announced just recently that as Google moves towards the future, more stringent measures will be used to measure a website’s value and therefore ranking. Most web developers are completely at peace with creating web pages that may look good without giving any importance to how the page code is written. This can cause different browsers to have different problems displaying the page properly.

This has usually never caused ranking problems, as Search Engines simply where not concerned with such page details. That is going to change. Google points out the following: A page that does not follow the rules will cause some browsers and therefore some visitors to experience some sort of problems down the road. In essence the best way to guarantee your best chance at good Google SEO rankings is to make sure your code is clean. Double check your code twice, make sure you close a table before starting another one and most importantly use the validator tools created by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the world organization in charge of creating web standards.

Most people get lazy, right around this point, after having spent weeks researching keywords, mapping an SEO strategy, and creating great content. It is like having a 3 year old child try to communicate chemistry or calculus. Your web site optimization strategy is only as good as your weakest link.

Getting used to checking your pages for validation often only makes you a better web developer and in the end you will know what things to avoid instinctively. We usually create a simple page, make sure it validates, and the use it as a framework for other pages. Also, we add the validation logo on every page during development, so as we code a web site, we can simply click on the validation icon after uploading the page and find out if there are any validation errors.

Keep in mind that in the future, it is very likely that if your pages don’t validate, you will never see any of your pages reach top-10 status on Google Search Engine Result Pages.

This guide should give you a good starting point to help with your Google SEO efforts. Keep an eye of the next guide, which will help expand on the topic of Search Engine Optimization.

Take a look at our site which contains detailed information on Google SEO topics to help you get your site’s ranking in the top 10 Google Search Engine Results.

What has changed?

Google can now index the textual content in SWF files of all kinds, including buttons, menus and self-contained Flash websites.

Google can also discover URLs that appear in Flash files and it adds these URLs to the crawling pipeline.

What has not changed?

Google still doesn’t recognize the text that appears on images. FLV files, such as YouTube videos also won’t be indexed because they don’t contain text.

As many Flash websites consist of images and other multimedia elements, the only text that Google finds on these websites might be “Loading”, “Please wait” or “Copyright”.

Google also cannot execute some JavaScript types. If your website loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google might not be able to find your Flash file.

In addition, Google cannot attach content from external sources that are loaded by Flash files. If your Flash page loads an HTML or XML file then these files will be treated as separate documents.

Why is Flash still a problem for search engines?

Flash content and regular HTML pages are fundamentally different. Just because Google can now index some text from Flash files doesn’t mean that Flash files are now search engine friendly. Here’s why:

It’s hard to divide the text into meaningful sections. Flash doesn’t use <h1> or <p> tags to separate different sections of text. It’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s not. Even worse, Flash designers often break down words into their individual letters to create “cool” text effects. That means that search engines cannot index these texts. Usually, the complete content of a website is presented on the same URL. You cannot link to a special part of a Flash website. That means that it is also difficult for search engines to find the relevant section of the Flash site. In addition, this means that Flash websites don’t get good inbound links to the right pages. Most Flash websites only get links to their home page. The structure of Flash websites makes it difficult to get high rankings. Many Flash files are linked from other Flash files and no other websites link to these internal Flash elements. The lack of links from other websites makes it very difficult to get high rankings for these elements.

Flash doesn’t use the basic SEO methods. You won’t find proper link texts, headline tags or even properly optimized title tags in most Flash sites. That makes it very difficult to get good rankings.
Most Flash content is still not crawlable. As mentioned above, Google won’t index content in images and it has problems with JavaScript calls.

What can you do to improve your rankings if you have a Flash site?

If possible, avoid pure Flash websites and use Flash elements only when needed. If you must use Flash on your website, the following tips will help you to get better rankings:

Include the text and the links from the Flash file in an HTML version on the same page.
Use JavaScript and CSS to find out if the website visitor can parse Flash and then present the CSS DIVs that contain the corresponding content. Regular website users will see the Flash file, visitors who cannot parse Flash (for example search engines) will see the HTML version. Use CSS and create a layer with your regular HTML content and then position another layer with the Flash content above the HTML layer so that your website visitors only see the Flash content.

Note that search engines might misinterpret this method as a spamming attempt.
Use different URLs for different sections of your website. Each set of content should have its own unique URL.

Flash has not been designed for search engines and it is extremely difficult to get high rankings with pure Flash sites. Using regular optimized web pages is the best way to get in Google’s top 10 results.

If you have a pure Flash website, you should make sure that your website has as many good inbound links as possible.