We have written many articles that either allude to, or come right out and say that your web design should avoid flash scripts wherever possible. It simply wasn’t good for search engine optimization. We have also written on several occasions about how quickly things can change when it comes to search engines and optimizing your pages.

Google have gone and done it again. Changed all the rules, and this time not for the better. Call me old fashioned, however there is nothing like a good clean HTML structure to your web pages. They are easy to edit and easy to modify when it comes to search engine optimization.

Andy Beal has reported on Google’s latest announcement relating to their ability to now spider Flash files and index the text content found. This includes any links but at this time not graphics or images.

Thanks to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, Google has announced a new indexing algorithm that is able to crawl and index the content of Flash files.

Andy seems to agree that this is not necessarily a step in the right direction by Google. Andy makes three very good points in his summary:

1. Until Google can demonstrate that its Flash crawling capabilities are equal to its HTML crawling, you risk building a site that, while indexable, is not as “optimized” as its simple HTML cousin.
2. If your Flash site is nothing but cool imagery and little else, you still won’t rank for much.
3. If you build Flash web sites just because you have the skilz–and not because it’s a better user-experience–I will not rest until I hunt you down!

As for the other search engines, there is no word on whether or not they will follow suit. You can be sure that somewhere along the way they will join the party. As for search engine optimization strategies, it is back to the drawing board.

Anyone who is using Flash in their web pages will need to ensure that the content that can be read is accurate, that links are not dead, and that keywords use is optimized. Search engine optimization surely is a never ending game.

Matt Cutts posted an interesting article on his blog yesterday titled Improved SEO documentation galore! where he list a great deal of documentation related to Google and search engine optimization strategies.

Highlights include reference to documentation on the use of robots.txt files with links to Google’s, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s posts on the topic. he also placed a link to a PDF booklet on robots.txt written specifically for those who don’t ‘live and breathe’ search engine optimization 24/7.

Other interesting topics include nofollow, cloaking and doorway pages, the later being search engine optimization no-no’s.

The most interesting part of the post was at the end where he covered the ‘primarily for users’ topic. What I found interesting, was the change from ‘make pages for users’ to ‘make pages primarily for users’. Obviously, the intent of any web page is to provide something for users. The addition of the primarily is a response to the acceptance of search engine optimization that can be done to a page. To quote from the post:

Some people have misinterpreted that guideline as “You can’t do a single thing for search engines that you wouldn’t do for your users,” and that was not my intent when I wrote that guideline. Instead, the spirit of that guideline is that users should be the primary consideration. But it is fine to do some things that don’t affect users but do help search engines.

Matt went on to quote some basic search engine optimization techniques that could be used on page that doesn’t affect the visitor to the website.

It seems the dome of silence that has surrounded Google for so long is now starting to lift. Next thing you now Google will be pounding the social networking sites looking for Stumbles or Diggs. I wonder who will be the first to bury! Search engine optimization, and for that matter, social marketing, will never be the same again. I wonder if they will release their algorithm sometime soon?

It’s a long title, but then Google’s latest blog post by by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, is not exactly short either. However, after reading what he had to say I had a reread wondering what lessons it might hold for search engine optimization consultants - and there were a few.

The first little tidbit that struck me was the comment about search terms: “We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words…“. So lesson number one when it comes to search engine optimization is to concentrate on keyword and keyword phrases of three words or less. He followed that with a comment on Page Rank:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.

So for all naysayers, PageRank is not quite dead. Mind you, he did not say to what extent PageRank was used. I still hold by my philosophy that whilst my PageRank means little to me, when I am seeking content to link to or from as part of my search engine optimization strategy, PageRank is still an indicator of page authority. So lesson number two: Don’t discard PageRank just yet.

This statement was interesting and should give rise to some thought:

In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average.

From that quote, lesson number three has to be: What works today may not work tomorrow. Google is constantly changing so our search engine optimization strategies have to revised frequently particularly if we notice a sudden dip in search results placements.

For ‘black hat’ proponents comes the following quote:

There is a whole team that concentrates on fighting webspam and other types of abuse. That team works on variety of issues from hidden text to off-topic pages stuffed with gibberish keywords, plus many other schemes that people use in an attempt to rank higher in our search results. The team spots new spam trends and works to counter those trends in scalable ways; like all other teams, they do it internationally.

The lesson number four, from this quote, is fairly straightforward: Don’t try to cheat the system. If your search engine optimization strategies are not within Google’s realm of fair play they will eventually find you out and penalize you. High placement for a short period of time is not worth the long negative effects.

The final lesson is one that we all know, users are becoming more sophisticated and over time their search queries are becoming more complex. Whilst lesson number one was to optimize for three keywords or less per search, the reality is that into the future searches will be using sentences. Lesson number five has to be: Prepare for change. How and when you do that will be dependent on the type of website you have. Eventually we will have to modify our search engine optimization strategies to meet sophisticated searches, at present, it may be counterproductive.

I could almost say business as usual after seeing the five lessons from the Google blog. It is refreshing to see them come out and actually explain a little about their activities and what is involved. The real lesson from the whole statement was number five, again, something we are all familiar with; when it comes to search engine optimization, prepare for change - assess - plan - implement - reassess. The search engine optimization never ending circle.

Sometimes your search engine optimization strategies need to take either a back seat or a sideways step. I have noticed a slight trend to displaying product results in Goolge SERPs. If this continues to be a trend then perhaps some of your search engine optimization energy needs directing towards submissions to Google Product Search.

You can enter your product details in the form of an XML file which Google will read and add to its database. The information in the file should include the product’s title, description, link and price. These details should be written in a similar to fashion to meta data as you would if you were undertaking a SEO program on that data.

The description should be detailed although not keyword stuffed and can be up to 10,000 characters in length. Include the brand and relevant information, that is, location, condition and delivery area. The title should just include the name of the product. If possible, include an image of the product. Whilst not a true search engine optimization strategy, if this data is going to appear in the SERPs then you need to be well positioned to capitalize on it.

Sometimes your search engine marketing strategies need to be outside of the box. While keyword stuffing is frowned upon within the products description, clever writing and smart use of keywords may produce some surprising results.

If you have Adsense for Search options on your web site then you will be interested to know that Google have updated the search facility and it is now powered by Custom Search. As the name implies, you can customize many of the search features for your web site (or blog).

These features include:(courtesy of Adsense blog)

• Site Search: you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site.
• Improved indexing of your pages:AdSense for search will now index even more pages of your site, as long as we’re able to crawl them, so that your users will see more results from your site in your AdSense for search results.
• Vertical search:You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites - this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful.
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords: Search terms can have different meanings in different contexts, so you can now configure your search engine with relevant keywords.
• Selecting ad location: Do you want ads to appear at the top and bottom of your search results? Or along the right sidebar as well, just like on Google.com? Now you can make the call on where ads are placed.
• Quick and easy updates: Just as you use our ad management feature to quickly change the settings for your ad and referral units, you’ll be able to do the same for your search engine within your AdSense account.

This should provide a much better system and possibly a better return for publishers using Adsense for Search. Customization is certainly an improvement on the previous search options.

Search engines have for many years been the king of online marketing and have led to the rise of the search engine optimization and search engine marketing industries. Are they, however, starting to lose their appeal and their relevancy?

There is so much in the way of competition at present that it is becoming impossible to really find what you want. Many search engines struggle to produce lists that satisfy the searchers queries. You can often undertake a search and find there 50 or 100 million pages that relate to that search query. However when you look a little closer, some of those entries are one or two years old ( or older). Either that or the search results bare little relationship to the question, an experience that often frustrates users.

Search engines such as Google are constantly trying to perfect their search results so that the user finds what they want, first time - so far with only limited success. Social media on the other hand may represent a different story into the future. Individuals are already using these sites to check for any information on products that they are interested in.

Anecdotal evidence from people who have used the products carries a lot of weight. A search results through any of the search engines carries little weight as a recommendation. Considering the difficulty, actual or perceived, of finding what you are looking for through a search engine, it is not difficult to understand why people are turning to these social sites for answers.

Search engines may well lose their appeal in the longer term as social sites becomes the pseudo search engines of the future. Unless Google and all the other search engines can find a way of delivering valuable links to each search query, they will continue to lose appeal.

While on the subject of Microsoft, Live Search has undergone a revamp with several new features added that enable users too both research and find deals on products.

The above screen shot shows the results of a typical search. These results include both negative and positive feedback that has been left. I am sure there is a search engine marketing and search engine optimization opportunity there. It would certainly pay to keep on eye on the results for any negative trends before they do too much damage to your reputation.

The highlights, as published by Live Search include:

• One stop to research product details and find good prices You see an image and description for each product, reviews from other users, prices to help you find good deals, and spec sheets for many products.
• Feature-based refinements See which products are reviewed positively or negatively for the features that interest you. View product features such as screen size, battery life, ease of use, and portability.
• Sorting Sort product results by user ratings, expert ratings, and price.
• Filtering Filter product results by specific brands, categories, and price ranges.
• Richer product details Read expert reviews and a spec sheet describing the product.

At present this feature is only available for US based searches. There is no indication yet for an international release.

Microsoft have finally decided that continuing to woo Yahoo! was not worth the effort and have now called off the wedding. One of the keys to the withdrawal of their $33 per share offer was not the extra $5 billion required, rather it is Yahoo!’s actions in starting to waltz with Google - currently the king of search engines.

Whilst Microsoft are not afraid of litigation, one of the key problems they would have had to deal with would have been the close relationship that Yahoo! currently has with Google. Two points from the Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) letter to Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang (Yahoo! CEO) clearly states their concerns:

In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

In fact, apart from the first couple of paragraphs, Ballmer hardly mentioned the dollar aspect. The question everyone will now ask is whether or not this is the end of the matter? Only Ballmer will know what is going on in his mind.

Acquiring Yahoo! had some strategic significance to Microsoft so it is quite likely Ballmer will sit back now and watch the Yahoo! Google watlz - a little like a wolf and chicken dancing - will they continue to dance, separate and find new partners, or does the wolf become the proverbial black widow and dine on the Yahoo! search engines left overs.

If Yahoo!’s alliance with Google sours a little and the price of Yahoo’s share drop significantly, you can bet that Microsoft will be back trying to improve their wooing skills. It is unusual for Microsoft as they have a reputation for shotgun weddings - perhaps next time.

A reader asked what I thought about the practice of using the display: none attribute in CSS to hide text. Generally speaking, hiding text on a web page is a method of keyword stuffing that search engines frown upon. You might get away with it in the short term, but don’t expect to be able to get away with it forever. Some search engine optimization gurus are always looking for ways to outsmart the search engines and get their web pages ranked higher and faster. That’s like trying to find a better way to rob banks. You might succeed, but keep robbing banks long enough and you’ll eventually get caught.

Over at search engine land, Eric Enge wrote a fabulous article on the legitimate use of the display: none attribute. Then he encouraged his readers to use the tactic to hide text on their web pages. Here’s a snippet:

The legitimate use of this technique is so prevalent that I would rarely expect search engines to penalize a site for using the display: none attribute. It’s just very difficult to implement an algorithm that could truly ferret out whether the particular use of display: none is meant to deceive the search engines or not.

I’m no expert on creating algorithms, but my guess is what is difficult today may be quite common next year or next month. At one time, it was difficult to clone cells. But then came Dolly the sheep. It was once difficult to land on the moon, then came along John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong. It was once difficult to run a 4-minute mile, but then Roger Bannister gave health experts a heart attack and did the impossible. Now, his record has been broken and the 4-minute mile is common place. Even The Bandit did what they said couldn’t be done.

The point is, it may be difficult today to create an algorithm that will catch the illegitimate use of display: none to hide text on your web pages, but that doesn’t mean search engines will never do it. They caught link farms, didn’t they? They caught URL cloakers. And Google is constantly updating its algorithms to make link building more difficult for spammers. I’m guessing that they could eventually discover a way to ferret out legitimate and illegitimate uses of a particular tactic. Even if they don’t, by employing such techniques, you are leaving yourself open to further scrutiny should the search engines see other red flags. The more risk you take in your SEO tactics, the more likely you are to run afoul of the search engines. They don’t have to rank you at all.

In a previous post, Search Engine Optimization Tips - Don’t Hide Your Name, I mentioned using you web site name, or domain name, in the header region of your web page. Several comments have looked at ways to place your site name in the header using techniques that hide it. The post title was ‘Don’t Hide Your Name’ and for good reason.

Using techniques such reducing the font size to one pixel; or making the font color the same as the background; or having your site name print way of the screen are all considered ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques and you are more likely to get penalized than gain any benefit from the technique.

If your site name had been included in your keyword list then I must say I wonder why you would want to hide it. There are techniques using your style sheet that enable you to have your site name published as text and still blending in quite well with your overall header design whilst providing search engine optimization value.

Obviously, if you want to get into fancy text then a graphic may be your only option. The point of the previous article is that you may get more search engine optimization value using text rather than a graphic.

The whole process starts with your web page design. You can go for fancy graphics or you elect to use text. If you use the graphic option, then be sure to use good alt tags. If you use text then the value is in the text. Either way, when it comes to search engine optimization, hiding data may sound good, but in the long run it will cost you more than you could ever gain.

Yahoo! has rolled out a limited beta of its new developer app called SearchMonkey. I like the general idea.

The tool will allow webmasters and other developers the ability to add enhancements to their search engine results at Yahoo! These enhancements could lead to an increase in traffic and if you’re like most webmasters, you probably could use that boost from Yahoo! SERPs.

The biggest problem I see in SearchMonkey is that searchers must opt in before they can see the enhancements. That doesn’t really help webmasters any. How many users will actually go through the trouble to opt in? My hope is that Yahoo! will release that restriction at some point in the future and simply deliver the enhancements to users without requiring them to opt in. That would help searchers and webmasters alike. Meanwhile, I encourage you to sign up for an account at SearchMonkey and play around then report the results back here. Do you like it? Is it helpful? Do you expect great results?

If Google, who for all intents and purposes owns and defines search, does not want a single web property ranking for the same keyword phrase more than once in order to maintain a diversity of search results for searchers, what do we make of blogs on a particular topic that have the potential to rank several pages for the same key phrase? Should bloggers be concerned that they are being discriminated against?

Google implemented this policy in order to be of better service to searchers. The search giant didn’t want experts in SEO dominating the rankings for all the keywords that people will search for. It’s actually a good policy.

If Bob and Benny both own a widget store in Seattle, Washington and Bob hires me to do his SEO for him while Benny decides to do it himself then Bob can’t dominate the SERPs because he has more money to spend. His 10,000 budget has the potential to outstrip Benny who must spend no more than 1-2 hours per day on writing his blog and other marketing (because he has a business to run). Because Bob can spend all day running his business and pay me to write his blog, run his PPC campaign, do article marketing, etc., Bob’s marketing efforts stand a better chance of succeeding in the search engine wars. But not if the playing field is leveled.

It isn’t discrimination against Bob to say that Benny deserves one of those spots as much as Bob does. It would be discrimination against Benny to say that Bob deserves them all because he can afford to pay an SEO to ensure that it happens. That’s why Google’s responsibility to maintain a fair playing field in the search results is so important to protect and it’s also why webmasters must seek out creative ways to rank in the SERPs beyond the mere blog and static website race.

It seems that there’s a new search engine startup every week. Everybody wants in on the search engine game, either to topple the king of search - Google - or just to make some money and capitalize on an ever-growing industry. Whatever the motives, there are some of the new startups that are worth trying, but others leave something to be desired.

The latest trend in search engines seems to be visual search results or video results. One such search engine was SearchMe. Now, a similar concept has come along called Viewzi.

Viewzi is still in beta. I had a chance to take it for a test drive, but I wasn’t impressed. Most of the results seem to come straight out of Google and Yahoo!, but you have to wait for the pages to transfer data in order to get the full benefit. One cool thing about Viewzi you can choose the type of view that your results are shown in, and there are several options offered, including:

• Text View
• Photo View
• Web Screenshot View
• Video View
• Among others

Unfortunately, all the results show on one page so the load time is tremendously slow. In text view, for instance, I got over 150 results for the first search I made and after a couple of minutes the results were still loading. That’s frustrating for a user. While I wait for my browser to interpret the information, I can’t do anything else. Now I know why the major search engines only include 10 results per page.

One view borrows the 3D scrolling screenshot concept of SearchMe. Not a bad idea really, but I don’t find it all that helpful since I have to scroll through every single screenshot just to see which results are available, unlike the text view that at least allows me to see multiple results at one time. In terms of adding visual search results to the SERP, I think that Ask has done the best job in making search more visual with its Ask 3D product. But I really see nothing special about the new search startups attempting to make search more visual.

Both Google and Live Search have added developments to their news Search Engine Optimization and search related tools that marketers can benefit from. First, Google:

To access these new features, first search for a person’s name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we’ll show it above the search results.

Nice feature. So how can marketers use this feature to help searchers find them more easily? Easy.

Submit a press release with a quote from a top executive of your company to any of several press release distribution websites. Any news agencies that pick up your press release could run it the way it is or call for an interview. Either way, you’re getting your company’s name and your executive’s name in the news. A search for your executive could yield the quote feature noted above with a link that allows searchers to find other news about your executive (and your company).

Now, Live Search:

Live Search is doing some serious revamping all over, but this week they’re talking about the changes they’ve made to their news search feature. There are several ways marketers can take advantage of these developments.

1. Aggregated News - Submit those press releases. If you have relevant news then your news could very well rise to the top.
2. Local News - Be sure to identify your locations in those press releases. People making local searches will find you a lot easier.
3. Multimedia - Include photos and videos in those press releases.

Look for other great developments from Live Search soon. They have plans to include RSS support, which another benefit to marketers, and access to the News search feature from Live Search’s home page.

Don’t count Microsoft out yet. These news improvements can help your business and marketing team perform better public relations and Search Engine Optimization efforts as well.

As this post from Matt Cutts illustrates, Google is now starting to crawl drop-down boxes:

Now Google is finding ways to crawl through forms and drop-down boxes. We only do this for a small number of high-quality sites right now, and we’re very cautious and careful to do the crawling politely and abide by robots.txt. If you’d prefer that Google not crawl urls like this, you can use robots.txt to block the urls that would be discovered by crawling through a form. But I hope that the dialog above is a pretty good example of why this new discovery method can be helpful to webmasters.

I find two critical pieces to this snippet that should be mentioned. First, right now they are only crawling forms and drop-down boxes for “high quality” sites. I’m not sure what “high quality” sites means, but my guess is that it doesn’t mean every site on line. I can also conjecture that “high quality” probably means something akin to Google’s already outlined quality guidelines for webmasters, meaning that if you run PPC campaigns then your landing pages must meet a certain level of quality. If you don’t then quality probably means the same thing it means for determining PageRank and rankings within the SERPs. That’s just a guess.

The second thing that is critical about this statement is that you can prevent Google from crawling forms and drop-down boxes with robots.txt. This is probably more critical for forms than for drop-down boxes. Most drop-down boxes are only going to include pages that are not protected by passwords, but if you have menu items on your drop-down boxes whose pages are password protected and you don’t want the search engines to access them then you need to include them in your robots.txt file. With forms, it is possible that form information that is saved as html documents on a server could be crawled and that could lead to privacy of your form users being sacrificed or critical information that you are trying to protect might be compromised. That’s a good time to use robots.txt. You should research this a little bit more in-depth.