The PPC Guru

In days past, web designers/developers faced a challenge if they chose to develop a site in Flash or place content inside of flash elements because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. An extra effort had to be made to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and widgets, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, they improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

There is one limitation, Google doesn’t crawl all types of JavaScript, which is used to execute almost all of the Flash content on the Internet. Google does not specify what types of JavaScript are executed, but said the company was working on executing all types. Adobe’s Everett-Church says: “This is our initial implementation… I think there will be some areas to expand on there, as well.”

Read more at the Google Webmaster Central Blog

Planning on moving your site to a new domain? How do you do it without losing rank or hurting your site’s performance in Google search results? The Google Webmaster Tools Team member Ríona MacNamara posted a best practices for moving your site to a new domain.

The aim should be to make the transition invisible to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your original pages should transfer the page strength to your new pages. Here is a summary of the Google recommendations:

• Test moving a handful of pages to the new domain first.
• Use 301 redirects to notify Google of the change.
• Redirect your pages to the most relevant new page. I  recommend that if a relevant page does not exist, make one.
• Make sure your internal links are pointing to the new domain.
• Register the new site with Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap.
• Review crawl errors within Webmaster Tools on both the new and old domain to catch any errors.

301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is the only search engine friendly strategy around for redirecting a page or site to another page or site. 301 redirects are interpreted by the search engines as "moved permanently," it’s not that hard to implement and it should preserves your search engine rankings for that particular page and transfers it those ranking to the new target page

Resources

• Google Webmaster Tools
• How to do a 301 Redirect

Google Analytics added a new benchmarking feature that allows users to compare their sites performance to their industry benchmarks. There is a catch, in order for you to use the benchmarking feature you will need to share your data with everyone else, on a completely anonymous level of course.

If you were that kid on the playground that never liked to share with everyone, you will not get industry benchmarking data. But you will also be able to decide if you want to share your data with other Google products. For example, if you want to share data between your AdWords Conversion Optimizer product and Google Analytics, you can do so by opting in to share your data with Google.

Read the rest of this entry »

All markets fluctuate, economic cycles come and sometimes go just as fast as they arrived, businesses rise and fall. But some companies survive and even thrive in periods of economic recession not to mention the companies that make the right marketing moves, emerge from the economic downturns in a stronger position.

Since you are here you probably already know that if you had the time and resources to only pursue one avenue of marketing, make it Internet marketing; it’s the least expensive and only completely measurable ways to get your name out there and reach the full spectrum of your client demographic.

Read the rest of this entry »