Each week I have the privilege of speaking about the developments of the Internet on Everything Internet Radio. In the two years since our show began airing we have covered a wide range of topics including Internet Marketing, Blogging, Wordpress, Google, Yahoo, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Web Design, and Security just to name a few. The Internet is a rapidly changing place and what was in two years ago in some cases is gone today. The life cycle of the new products and ideas has grown ever shorter over the years and is likely to continue getting shorter.

We introduced Twitter to our audience 18 months ago on Everything Internet and it was just a cute word, we were twitting, tweeting, and trying to explain a blog that was only 140 characters long. When we would get questions and explain it, people usually responded with “why would I want to know what my cousin had for lunch”. In fact one cell phone company actually launched a campaign featuring a father tweeting and a mother on Facebook using their mobile phones while their teenage children attempt an intervention.

While there has been a lot of fun poked at things like Twitter, there are emerging very useful applications of the technology. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can actually make it. They still lose money.

Along with Twitter we spoke about My Space which was replaced for the most part by Facebook. Like Twitter these social media applications have trouble finding ways to make money. Thanks to Farmville and freemium games, Facebook is making a profit. (freemium is a new Internet word for part free and part fee based products). Predictions however say that Facebook will soon be replaced by yet another form of Social Networking within a couple of years.

Old stable Internet operations also have their challenges. It seems Google is gobbling up all the new ideas as quickly as they hear about them. Even companies like EBAY have slowed down when they changed some policies that their users did not care for. Amazon keeps running strong in the web store space but both Google and Yahoo are angling for the space.

One of the best things about doing a weekly radio show like Everything Internet is having a company Like Masterlink Interactive to draw on for expertise. None of us can know it all and being able to tap the experts at Masterlink has provided a valuable resource for our clients and listeners alike. It really helps when your resource for knowledge has been there from the start of the Website industry. Masterlink has been there since 1995. For those of you mature enough to know that’s when it really started to develop.

If you get a chance, drop by the www.eiradioshow.com website and listen to two years of archived program segments or listen live Saturdays at 1:00. You will find just about everything that is and will be happening on the Internet. You will also hear from some of guest experts we have on the show many of whom come from Masterlink Interactive.

By Ed Frazier - CNN 1190 AM - Everything Internet

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?

Having a landing page that sticks is imperative to online success. Your company’s landing page is the first thing visitors see when they come to your website, and it’s the only thing that determines whether they hit the back button or stay to learn more.

Let’s look at five ways that will help make your landing pages stick:

1. Highlight Keywords Earlier- If someone lands on your page after searching for “mortgage Texas,” make sure those keywords show up earlier in the copy. It’s pretty annoying when you visit a website and it takes 25 minutes just to find what you were originally searching for.
2. Have Congruent Images - Stock images that vaguely describe what you do are not going to boost conversions. Please do not put up a picture of 4 people that look like they are auditioning for next season’s Apprentice if you are selling landscaping services. Testing images to see which increases conversion is key.

3. Keep it Easy on the Eyes- This means leaving lots of white space, writing in bullet points, and putting key points in bold. Clutter on a landing page should be avoided at all costs.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” – Einstein

4. Make the Most of your Header- Your header is prime real estate. Design it to create an impression. Make sure it shows off the image that you wish to project to your prospects and clients. It doesn’t have to be magnificent, but it better look clean and professional!
5. Have a Clear Call to Action- The main point of having a landing page is to get your visitor to perform a certain action. In many business situations, you want the prospect to call you or submit information for follow-up. Make sure that your call to action is nice and clear.

Most importantly, be sure to regularly tweak and test your landing pages to find out what works best for your unique situation.

PS. Check out this landing page we designed for our client, TexasLending.com. and their free mortgage quote.

Recently Adobe, the software provider of Flash, announced it is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! The new development is said to improve search results for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the Flash file format.

Adobe explained on their website:

“This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”

That all sounds great, but I wouldn’t go and redesign your CSS and HTML developed site for an all Flash experience just yet.

There are still many issues to consider that can prevent the search engines from treating your Flash content as regular HTML text. Back when Al Gore created the internet it started as primarily text based pages. The search engine algorithms were built around analyzing that text. And that has not changed.

Search engines may now be able to access the text within a Flash file but they cannot quite process it as they do HTML text. They still look in the HTML for important meta data used to structure the HTML. This information can include the title tag, the formatting code as in H1, bolded text and lists as well as image alt tags.

In addition to the limits of processing text in Flash, the search engines will have problems with the lack of unique URLs found in Flash sites. Many times a Flash site is all contained within the homepage URL. As you navigate through the site the URL never changes. This means all of the text processed by the search engines will have to be indexed as one single page. It also means that they may not process all of the text in the site as they will not execute all of the actions within the Flash.

The indexing of Flash text may also cause less than ideal user experiences. As the search engines find text within the Flash site not contained in the first level a visitor may discover the site in the search results only to find once they click through that the text they’re searching for is not there. Rather than trying to navigate though the site to find what they’re looking for they’ll likely click the back button to find a page that has that info right away.

Now I’m not saying all Flash is bad. We create Flash animations on many of our web site designs. And since we are also search engine optimization company our designers typically limit the Flash portion to a small animated banner at the top of a page that has images and text. The text not being that important for search engines as we make sure the sites and pages all have plenty of unique indexable HTML text content to feed to the search engines. This type of Flash use has never been a big concern for us and still isn’t. The concerns would be for those sites whose entire development was done in Flash. I’m not betting on those sites magically ranking for competitive terms suddenly.