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Flash and High Rankings still don’t Mix

Flash pages still won’t get high rankings on Google

Some webmasters prefer to have a pure Flash website because they can look very impressive. Although Google can index Flash content to some extend, it is very unlikely that a Flash page will get high rankings on Google.

The problem:

Flash content cannot be indexed by search engines. If your website is a pure Flash site, then you can be sure that search engines won’t be able to see 95% of your website content.

Google has several official statements regarding Flash content:

Search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. [...] Any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines. [...]

We recommend that you use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, and instead use HTML for content and navigation.”

Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash.

This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can’t view Flash.”

Adding your content in the noscript tag won’t help

Theoretically, adding your web page content in the noscript tag on your web pages should make sure that search engines get the right content. Unfortunately, Google’s John Mueller indicates that this doesn’t work anymore:

“One of the problems with noscript is – as others have mentioned – that it’s been abused quite a bit by spammers, so search engines might treat it with some suspicion.

So if this is really important content, then I wouldn’t rely on all search engines treating your noscript elements in the same way as normal, visible, static content on your pages. If this is ‘just’ for comments, then that might be worth considering.”

What does this mean to your website

If you want to get a reasonable amount of visitors through search engines, don’t use Flash and other multimedia elements for the main contents of your web pages:

Only use Flash for decorative purposes.
The navigation of your website should use regular HTML a href links. Do not use fancy JavaScript or Flash navigation menus. Most search engines cannot parse them.
The main content of your web pages should be available as simple text.

Posted in Online Advertising, Search.

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Offering Coupons to Increase Sales

Have you ever wanted to sell a product on your website, but as hard as you tried, you were unable to get people to buy it? It was a great product and people expressed interest in it, but not enough were buying? The problem isn’t your product—it might be, but I doubt it—but instead, the problem is your overall sales concept. You are not appealing to people’s psyche and that is limiting your sales.

People like to believe that they are going to get something for less than everyone else. In other words, people want to think that if they buy the product, they are getting it for cheaper than someone else. They want to think that they gamed the system and that they are “special.”

Understanding that psychological aspect to the game makes it so that the seller can increase the number of products that they sell. By understanding that the buyer wants the most bang for their buck, and that a coupon reduces the price and therefore provides that increased bank, a seller can increase the amount of money they’re going to make from selling their product.

Take for example, two coupons that I offer on one of my websites. One of them is a 10% coupon for Island Surf and the other is a 20% coupon for Navteq. Now, these two companies are not making as much potential profit on the sale of their items because they are cutting their revenue by 10-20%. However, they are actually making more money because they are giving away the coupon. Here’s why…

In economics, there’s a fine line between price and revenue. If you price something too high, sure, you make a lot of money for every one item sold, but you don’t sell as many products. If you price something too low, sure, you sell a ton of items, but you don’t really make all that much money per item. If you price it just right—that happy medium between high and low—then you make the most because you are selling the optimal amount of product for its price.

Another reason that you might give a coupon away is because you want to increase the overall purchase size. It’s better if a customer spends $125 instead of $100, even if you had to take 25% off the overall purchase. If you’ve got that extra $25 coming in, that’s good. What a coupon does is create a scenario where more money is being spent because the customer believes they are getting a better deal. So, they spend more which means you bring in more money…

If you’re pricing items correctly and the coupon isn’t too great, that means more profit. Just because the profit per item is lower, the total profit is actually higher because you generated more revenue.

Your best bet is to price your item and see how it does. If it is selling like mad, you might have priced the item too low or you’ve already found your perfect price range. However, if you’re not getting very many sales, release a coupon. Maybe it’s 10% or maybe it’s more. But, release the coupon and see what it does for your sales.

Chances are, you’ll see more people buying it because it falls into their price range and suddenly, they are more excited. And since they are “gaming the system,” they’ll feel that emotional and psychological connection to getting it. And that’s where you walk away with more sales.

Why else do you think so many companies around the world utilize coupons? They work!

Jay is an Internet marketer who specializes in helping businesses increases sales. One of the sites he runs often times has coupons and discounts for products such as Navteq and Island Surf. Visitors are able to find islandsurf.com coupons and navteq promo that really help users save money. 

Posted in Online Marketing.

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Google now counts links from and to subdomains as internal links

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links.

We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

Posted by Susan Moskwa

Posted in Search.

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Figure out what users want

This video of Matt Cutts is explaining where your focus has to be for the future. Don’t chase the google rankings, but figure out what users want and work on that. If you serve your users and they get what they are looking for, rankings will follow.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Are you working on this? How do you give your users what they want?

ps: Is it summer already Matt ;)

Posted in Online Business, Search, Website Development.

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2011

Oliebol

The balls at this picture are ‘Oliebollen’, I don’t know the exact english term for it or that it even exists in English :P They are pretty good though and made them at the last day of 2010. You shouldn’t eat too much of these though, when you have some beers afterwards they are going to float, and you don’t want that ;)

2010

A year with ups and downs. Learned a lot, didn’t make big money though. Learned some important life lessons.

2011

Finish school is something I need to do this year. If I don’t finsh it I have to pay a € 3000 fine. So I better finish it.

New websites are on the way. We got some pretty cool ideas that are in development now and showing good progress. I will keep you guys updated!

Posted in Website Development.

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