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
Multi-page Checkout vs. One Page Checkout – Time is money
May 7, 2008
In the e-commerce world, much like any other world, time is money. A great deal of e-commerce sites are built in such a way where you search for a product, click to “proceed to checkout” and then you enter the checkout process where you sometimes have to create a profile before you are able to buy the product you are interested in and then you have to enter your delivery information, what type of shipping you would like and then you credit card you would like to pay with and then lastly process the transaction.
Sounds tiring and I wonder if customers give up at certain points during the checkout. I can personally say that I have decided not to buy a product online before because they made it too hard to buy the product so what makes your customers so different? It’s just a little “food for thought” when you are viewing your sales funnels and cart abandonment rate and wondering why are customers dropping off at certain points in the online sales process. Check out the One Page checkout…
Luc
Google, Yahoo! And MSN Webmaster Tools
April 18, 2008
I thought I would write a small article about the tools offered by the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) because a lot of times unless you are directly or indirectly involved in SEO you are not going to take the time to know these and these tools are very useful in telling you what is wrong with your website and also what you can do to improve your website for search engine consumption.
- Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Note: Having an XML sitemap ready to go on your website is a MUST to setting these accounts up and you will need to verify the site when you first submit it to these search engines. All of these are FREE to use but you must register an account to use each of them
Enjoy these tools!
Luc
Robots.txt and your Website
March 24, 2008
I was stumbling through Google Webmaster Tools earlier today and I noticed that they have a neat tool to help you when it comes to analysing your Robots.txt file. To get to this tool perform the following steps…
- Login to Google Webmaster tools
- Click on the website you’d like to analyse
- Click on “Tools” on the left hand side of the page
- Click on “Analyse Robot.txt”
It doesn’t matter whether your website is built using WordPress, Durpal, SalesForce.com or one of many others because a Robots.txt file can be installed on any website. Usually a good rule of thumb is to install it in the root directory of the website making it easy for spiders from search engines to crawl through your website.
You can tell which content you want search engines to look at and which content you don’t want them to look at by modifying this file.
Here are some modifications you may find helpful…
Disallow Way Back Archiving
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
Allow Adsense Bot on the entire website
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*
Disallow Files ending with certain extensions
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow files in certain directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /about/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /contact
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Popular User Agents
* - all user agents
GoogleBot – crawls website and news pages
GoogleBot-Mobile – crawls mobile index
GoogleBot-Image – crawls image index
Mediapartners-Google – crawls pages to determine adsense content
AdsBot-Google – crawls pages measure adwords landing page quality
Yahoo! Slurp – crawls pages for Yahoo!
So when you go to edit your Robots.txt file remember that you can tell the Robots that are sent out by the Search Engines what to search for.
