Ok, so my SEO gurus are not going to like my title, but it’s true! Now don’t get me wrong, my SEO Specialists are the BEST and they do an excellent job of getting that wonderfully sought after target audience to your website. However, what happens when the user gets to your site? Is it easy to use? Is it compelling for the visitor? Does the web design look professional? Does it look trustworthy? Is it outdated?

A billboard or newspaper advertisement can be used to drive foot traffic to your brick and mortar store, but if the store is dirty, the merchandise is not properly organized and the service is poor, you will not make the sale. The same is true for your website – probably even more so! Whether you are selling a product or a service, your prospective online customer is going to make a judgment about your company before ever talking to a real live person or stepping into that million dollar office you occupy.

That old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression” was never more relevant than today. If that visitor to your site hits the dreaded “back” button before visiting anything more than your homepage (referred to as the bounce rate), you are dead in the water. They will not be coming back.

Now is a great time to take a retrospective look at your current site and see what can be done to catch those visitors that are coming to the site. Some great ideas for drawing those visitors in might be:

• Incorporate some interesting Flash animation to your site that also provides a valuable message to the user that will entice them to want to learn more. Don’t use movement just to see something move – your visitors do not want to be entertained.
• Prominently place a call to action on your homepage.
• Offer some type of online-only value to the visitor, a special coupon, discount, free evaluation, etc. Make sure this information is front and center when they come to your site.
• This may sound simple, but put your phone number and a contact us button on your homepage – users do not want to hunt for that information.
• The homepage should be clean and clutter-free – don’t have too many messages fighting for attention.
• Make sure the content is fresh and new – add a press release, new blog posting.
• Remove any annoying music, sound or auto-launching video.
• Employ a tagline that tells the user exactly what you do – no “cutesy” or “creative” taglines.
• If your site looks like it was designed more than 2 years ago – START OVER.

We have seen conversion rates as high as 30% on sites that are well designed with great SEO that really targets the correct visitor. Even if you are getting conversions with your current site, study your online statistics – you could be missing out on a lot of potential new business.

Google recently made another announcement regarding their Flash indexing capabilities. Last year they announced they had learned to crawl and index Adobe Flash content. At that time I covered the announcement with my opinion that Google’s indexing of Flash content does not equal that of properly optimized HTML content. This time around the improvements seem to be based on googlebot’s interaction with Flash content, such as clicking buttons as well as improved indexing of external files.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

The blog post uses an example that shows Flash content in an external file ranking in Google results where it was not previoulsy. The query [2002 VW Transporter 888] returns this result:

When checking the source code of the resulting page the searched for terms do not appear. Checking Google’s cache of the page shows us that the phrase is not found on the page.

You can see that Google shows us their default message when the text is not found in the HTML source of the page, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”.  I checked both Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOmoz’s LinkScape and both reported zero links to the page. So, yes, I think that proves that Google is not only indexing Flash but also ranking the content.

However, I’d like to see an example of a competitive phrase contained only in Flash content ranking well in Google. The phrase “2002 VW Transporter 888″ is obviously not very competitive with only around 23k pages appearing for the phrase in Google’s index of billions of pages. Until I see Flash content ranking for competitive phrases I will still recommend to all of my clients that all of their desired keywords are contained within properly optimized HTML text on the page.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely against using Flash as part of interactive web design. MasterLink uses Flash in many new web sites as part of the overall design. But HTML text will always be the focus for competitive SEO as far as I am concerned.

SEOMoz posted their SEO Best Practices today and gave their opinion on SEO and Flash:

Although we believe the search engines can crawl Javascript and Flash in a limited capacity, we choose not add the risk. Their ability to parse these languages is inferior to their ability to parse HTML and choosing to code in the former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

I wholeheartedly agree. What do you think about this announcement from Google? Will it change the way you SEO your sites?

Real-time search is one of the newest battlegrounds on the web. In fact, history may show real-time search as the development that saved social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as stand-alone entities.

You see, despite all of the growing attraction of web users to social media sites, the ugly truth is that most social media sites have never been able to show a long-term profit. Myspace has been the exception since completing a 3 year, $900 million advertising contract with Google in 2006, but there is no way to know whether Myspace will be able to maintain their Google contract or their profitability.

One common way of start-up companies making money is to auction their business to the best offer such as when Google bought Youtube. There have been rumors of numerous companies from Microsoft to Google and even Apple buying up Twitter.

Real-time search may just re-define how users use the internet. It is the ultimate combination of search and social media. Searching real-time information allows engines that provide the service to display as results that are happening across the web without delay. Since social media postings are updated frequently they are easily able to gain dominance in this sort of platform over traditional articles or blogs. Combining these results with ads seems to be the obvious sought after answer to the profitability questions. Below are some of the hottest real-time search engines across the web.

General Real Time Search

Collecta: This site has not quite reached beta, but the home page does provide two example sneak-peaks. The layout is likely to change before it gets to beta.

Google: Google recently launched a number of new features, and real-time search is one of them. This is found by doing a search from the Google main page, and then selecting “show options” directly under the Google logo. One of the options available is “Past 24 Hours”. Larry Page recently discussed real-time search at the Google Zeitgeist conference in the UK. It is difficult to imagine Google being left behind in anything search-related. The results from this page appear to contain very few, if any social media pages, so it is possible that Google is focused on displaying links that come from already trusted sources.

OneRiot: From the searches I’ve done this site also appears to show links indexed from posts on social media sites purely. They appear to rank the posts by popularity (re-tweets, diggs, ect. ) and how recently they were posted. Each link shows the original author’s logo or profile picture that posted the indexed link so that credit is given. While each of the sites give credit to the original posting author, this extra step may be the distinguishing feature makes OneRiot more favorable. The layout is a basic vertical format.

Scoopler: My favorite between each of these has been a toss-up between Scoopler and OneRiot. Scoopler appears to index any links it from posts all over the web as fast as possible, though I did not notice any repeat links. While this allows for seeing a lot of information this also allows for a site like Twitter to dominate the results. To combat one domain dominating the results the site provides popular searches and popular links that are posted throughout the web. The site also automatically displays the next result on the page without requiring the user to refresh or click a button. The layout is probably the best out of the four general real-time search engines.

Twitter-Based Real Time Search

Twitter Search: The search feature allows a user to search all of Twitter’s posts for the specific keywords. While the search is only for Twitter users it is a very powerful tool.

TweetMeme: This tries to display Twitter posts by popularity as well as organizing the posts by categories. It has a search option that mimics Twitter Search for the most part, and each link has a button that allows the user to re-Tweet the link in question. There also seems to be a lot of integrating features with Twitter, which may help it keep from being disregarded as Twitter Search expands.

Twitmatic: Much like TweetMeme, Twitmatic tries to integrate with Twitter by having a Twitter login link directly on the page. It only indexes videos posted on Twitter. I tried multiple attempts to search on two different days with no success after at least 10 minutes. This service will need to be at least serviceable to attract users.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target. ~George Fisher

Don’t let your desire for perfection get in the way of your marketing goals. Being hesitant and indecisive when forming ideas for your interactive marketing strategy can waste a lot of valuable time. It can also cost you some valuable leads that you would be generating if you had just committed to getting it up and running. Time is money, and the more time you spend not having an effective online marketing solution, the less money you are going to be making.

Some people will spend months or years polishing a business plan, making sure every single detail is examined and estimated, only to find that in practice, it’s not as they imagined it. That’s way too much time wasted planning and thinking, when they should have be doing and learning.

The same is true about your Interactive Marketing Solution. You know that you need to figure something out to stay competitive. All this talk about Web 2.0, corporate blogging, and social media is pretty confusing. It’s scary knowing that you need to do something, yet having no clue on what to do. How can you identify what is right for your company?

Well, the best advice is to let someone (I suggest MasterLink) help you formulate an Interactive Marketing Action Plan. Working with a collaborative Interactive Marketing partner to identify your goals and objectives is a great way to establish what your interactive marketing solution should be. By setting goals, it is then easy to work backwards to discover ways of achieving them. Hey, it turns out you don’t need that corporate blog or the fancy 3-d flash intro after all. Nice!

Marketing is an ongoing process. You discover that your favorite campaigns are not quite as effective as you planned, or that the one you had no hopes for, surprisingly has a high conversion rate. Because the nature of marketing is so volatile, the best strategy is to get it going and just test, tweak, test, tweak, test, etc.

You can come up with millions of excuses not to get a website up, not to set up a Pay-Per-Click campaign to drive traffic to your company’s product pages, or not to start utilizing Search Engine Optimization to increase your business’ online visibility and credibility. Stop it! Quit making excuses.

Your best option is to start right now before your competition leaves you in their dust. When you spend so much time looking for the “best” choice that you never actually do anything, you are sabotaging your company.

Even if the target is moving, it still is best to shoot. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.