Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Without sufficient visits to your website you will not generate any sales through it. Hence the absolute requirement is to get the targeted traffic. How will you go about it no matter whether you launched a brand new website or it is been hosted for a long time now?

ATTRACT

1. 1. Attract through the information

There are several ways your visitors can find your website address.

1. Search Engines
2. Blogs, article sites & Forums
3. By incorporating the website address in every kind of marketing collateral

The above mentioned vehicles of information are the first point of contact between your visitors and your website.

When your prospective customer used a query in a search engine like Google for the product/service you offer, imagine the absence of your website on first two pages of results. There is hardly any chance he/she will visit your website. On the other hand, if your website is on first page you will get the traffic effortlessly.  This is where SEO Services for your website will help you.

We all are information hungry. We like to get a complete picture of the product or service we are going to purchase before the buying decision. Even your potential customers do the same. Before settling for the purchase they search in their favorite search engine, check through forums, blogs, read articles etc. So how important it is to have your presence in all these platforms to get your voice heard and attract them to your website! Even the mentioning of your website in the offline world in your brochure design, visiting card and other adverts has a great value!

1. 2. Attract through the design

Designs give the first hand information about how your products look like or what value do you offer from your services. You can prove the uniqueness of your product or services through your designs. This makes your website designing, logo designing or brochure designing important.

If you have attracted your visitors through your designs, it will be a lot easier to engage them further and convince them to buy your offering.

ENGAGE

How will it help you if you receive tons of traffic to your website but no enquiries? No matter how attractive your website, logo or brochure is, unless you build the credibility thereon, you will not be able to allure your visitors to make a purchase. People visit websites to check who they are dealing with. The first visit seldom converts your prospect. This is why your first impression through design and content will help you get their attention from where you can engage them to hear what you going to say.

1. 1. Engage by giving experience

People do business with people. On your website show who you really are. Tell your story in an engaging way. Make your social media presence prominent. This will help them understand your business personality and your business values.

1. 2. Engage by building credibility

Highlight your testimonials, business awards, and community involvement. When considering the testimonials, negative feedback is not that bad at all. It is in fact desirable to have honest feedback from your customers on your website than only the positive reviews.

CONVERT

Below are few tips to increase conversion rate of your website

1. Provide easy access to customer support
2. Offer special offers, discounts and promote them compellingly
3. Offer multiple payment options to your visitors to attract more buyers
4. Welcome feedback
5. A prominently visible toll-free number is a good idea

The above described attract, engage, convert rule is simple yet effective. If followed religiously nothing can stop you from attaining online success.

The universal fact that Search engines love text based websites more than the best looking Flash based websites makes it tough for both web designer and website owners to decide on whether it is alright to give in to search engine ranking drop penalty . Flash content is often weighty consisting of images, interactive features, animations, light on text thus confusing the search engines to decide what is in the Flash movie! The condition is worse if the website is built completely using Flash technology as this is devoid of page structure elements, distinctive page titles and internal linking. The situation has been better since 2008 when Google announced the improved search engine Flash indexing hence a ray of hope in making Flash websites search engine friendly.

Main setbacks while working on SEO of Flash Websites :

1.       Even the most basic SEO attributes like title tag, img alt attributes, anchor text, headline tags (h1, h2, h3) are not very simple to implement in Flash.

2.       Even when your Flash content is organized uniquely according to the topic, importance, and category – search engines fail to see that. That means different kind of content is not on different urls instead everything is on the same url. This makes it impossible to link to unique parts of your Flash content.

3.       Search engines do not index the content from outer files to your website called by any of your Flash content. Also they don’t allow the execution of external JavaScript calls which most of the Flash websites are relied upon. This results in a lot of content being not able to get crawled. Example: Dynamically loaded file such as an xml file.

4.       Animated text in Flash is often considered as duplicate content by the search engine spiders!

5.       Links in Flash are readable but only when they are pointed to HTML pages. Link which takes to a .swf page is not followed by the search engine spider.

Some Tips to Make Flash Websites Search Engine Optimization practice friendly:

Build separate HTML page for each FLASH page and embed related Flash content on every HTML page. This is to ensure that even the search engines will be able to index your content and you get your message across your reader through the user friendly Flash content which is on every page.

1.       Use metadata feature for title and description of .swf files even when it is stated of as lesser importance.

2.       Adobe Flash Search Engine SDK applications help search engines to extract textual content which includes text and links from .swf files to html file.  The tool which comes in handy is swf2html.  Even when this does not assure the highest quality results this step will get us the best possible input for Search Engine Optimization process for Flash websites.

3.       Making use of Flash Programming: Search engines bots can’t view Flash but they can view primary content in the page such as headings, links and other usual content we can add to an HTML page. To solve the problem in a better way “alternative content” concept could be used. But unfortunately this privilege is being abused to trick the search engines. One of the tactics is:

a)      SWFObject

This can be used to provide alternative content to the Flash pages. And is considered as white hat SEO method. But if this is used to disguise the content i.e. showing some different content to the search engine crawlers to manipulate them while the Flash displays something else then those sites will get penalized.

More about Flash Programming for SEO in the next article!

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