How to Improve SEO for flash-based websites
July 23, 2008
After spending a weekend hiring a photographer for our upcoming wedding, we were looking at his website and he asked me “How is flash handled by search engines and is there anything that you can do to improve SEO short of redesigning the website without flash?” Now I know that a lot of companies big and small out there use Flash, Applets and Movies to improve the look, feel and navigation of their site but few realize how much this can impact the SEO on their website. I am going to give away some free information about how you can improve SEO on your website when you use objects like Flash, Movies or Java Applets (Use at your own risk).
Using <NOEMBED> tags
Using <noembed> tags means that you can add written content in a way that search engines can read the page without it being seen as though you are trying to trick the search engine with hidden text.
<embed src=”html.swf” width=”50″ height=”100″ />
<noembed>
<H1>Web Flash Movie</H1>
<p>This is a movie about flash and how to use it.</p>
</noembed>
Because there are a lot of media websites out there optimizing pages, objects and movies for search engines presents a problem and a current possibility for solving this problem is by using the <noembed> tags for multimedia content on your website. Feel free to test out this code in your websites.
Luc
How to Create a PayPal Sandbox Account
July 18, 2008
I’ve been using PayPal for the last couple of years for buying, invoicing and receiving payments from customers. As websites and web site design and development continue to increase PayPal has become the way to accept payment for a lot of businesses, possibly yours as well. It has also become very customizable to meet the growing and changing demands of its customer base to the point where you can customize it in any fashion you’d like. And with this ability comes the PayPal Sandbox account.
What does “Sandbox” mean?
Sandbox refers to a term used in development that allows developers or users to test their PayPal system and greatly customize it. You can see why this is a great idea if you’ve ever tried to test a third party application like PayPal.
Why should I get a PayPal Sandbox Account?
If you work with PayPal, have an ecommerce site that uses PayPal or you are interested in testing PayPal then getting a PayPal Sandbox Account is a good idea because it allows you to test transactions, understand the flow of how a transaction process occurs and figure out difficult bugs with your ecommerce platform.
Where can I get a PayPal Sandbox account?
You can get a PayPal Sandbox account by clicking here…
With more then 100,000,000 people using PayPal it makes sense that businesses want to offer this as a payment option to their customers and as a way to run their business.
Luc
Using Google’s Website Optimizer for the First Time
July 11, 2008
I must say that I am an avid lover of Google’s tools from Google Analytics to Google Trends and even iGoogle. Recently I had a chance to play around with Google’s Website Optimizer tool which allows you to run “experiments” on your website to see which page has a higher conversion rate and then you have more “actionable” data to base your company’s decision making on rather then just guessing blindly in the dark.
In order to use Google Website Optimizer you will need to first sign up for an account by clicking here (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer). Once you login you your Google Website Optimizer account you will see that you have the option of running an A/B Split test or a Multivariate Testing on your web site or landing page. For those of you who are unsure of what A/B split testing is please read the article.
How do I create an experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer?
- Login to Google Website Optimizer
- Click on the “Create another Experiment” link
- Select the option of creating an A/B Experiment or a Multivariate Experiment (The difference as Google defines it is that A/B Experiments are for few then 1000 views a week and Multivariate Experiments are for web pages that receive greater than 1000 views per week)
- For the purposes of this article we select “A/B Experiment” and click the “create >>” button
- Click the check box on the A/B Experiment Checklist and click continue once you have everything mentioned on that list ready to go (The page you want to test, created alternate versions of the page and identify the conversion page)
- On this next page you will need to name your experiment, Identify the original and variation web page URL s and enter the URL for the conversion web page and click “Continue >>” button at the bottom of the page.
- Lastly you will need to add the JavaScript code to the pages (Original web page, Variation web page and Conversion web page) and click “Preview” to see how your experiment will look like when it runs.
Google’s Website Optimizer is an awesome tool in providing actionable information about the design of a web page and how visitors user it. I hope you enjoyed the article as it has been a little while since i’ve written on the PureWebAnalytics blog.
Luc
Viewing Reports using Source/Medium in Google Analytics
June 5, 2008
I came across this tool that allows you to view reports in Google Analytics using Source/Medium on your website. The tool is actually a Firefox plug-in that when used with the Firefox browser you can view the visitor’s source by the medium they were delivered to your website on.
To get this functionality all you need to do is download the Greasemonkey plug-in and download the following script (addtosegment2.js). You will need to restart your Firefox browser in order for the changes to take effect.
Once you’ve downloaded this plug-in and installed the script and configured it you can go into your Google Analytics account and navigate to the following to view the results…
- Click on “View Reports” in your Google Analytics Account
- On “Traffic Sources Overview” click “View Report”
- Click “Search Engines”
- Beside the “Segment” field click on the down arrows
- You’ll see an option to view by “Source/Medium”
This means that you will see the Source (Eg. “Google”) and the medium (Eg. “Organic”) together, and making it easier to view how your traffic was obtained using Google Analytics reporting.
This will show you various ways that you can segment your reports in Google Analytics from the standard (out of the box) solution offered by the Google Analytics team.
Keyword Density: What is it and how do I measure it?
May 28, 2008
So what is keyword density anyways?
Keyword Density applies to the written content of your page and is the specific density of a certain keyword or phrase on a particular page.
KWD = Number of times a keyword appears in a page/Total number of words on that web page
The sweet spot for developing keyword density is between 5% and 10% for this article (web page) I managed to score the following…
Keyword / phrase: keyword density
KWD = 6/123 = 4.9%
