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There are many different forms of online writing assignments which web content producers take on these days. Ranging anywhere from one page articles to academic papers of 100 pages or more, there is a wealth of opportunities available to web content writers. One type of web content production which more and more individuals are expressing an interest in is ebooks. For those who are new to the topic of ebooks and are curious how to create ebooks while fending off any potential episodes of writers block, the following will provide some helpful hints on the subject.

Write About a Subject Which Is Not Too Obscure

One of the ways in which writers block can strike an ebook writer is when the individual chooses a topic which is simply too obscure in nature. Perhaps the topic is so new that it hasn’t been published that often or perhaps it is simply something which many are not that interested in. This is not to say that you should choose a topic which is overtly mainstream, simply keep the fact in mind that obscure topics may lead to writers block and frustration throughout the process.

Brainstorm Prior to Writing the Ebook

When wondering how to create ebooks without being susceptible to writers block you should keep the tip in mind that brainstorming prior to starting to write the book is a wise idea. By brainstorming about your topic and taking notes on your findings, you will discover that you have a wealth of information right at your fingertips. Should you ever come to a lull in the writing process, simply take out your notes and continue with the writing.

Read Up on the Subject

The more information you have when you are creating an ebook the less likely you are to experience writers block. Therefore, when wondering how to create ebooks without the nagging episodes of writers block, remember to read up on the subject matter both before and during the writing process. Having new ideas in your head and really knowing the truth behind your topic will help you to avoid writers block. With that said, you should always produce an original ebook yet gather pertinent information to give you a good background on your ebook topic.

When You Think of New Information, Write It Down

Some individuals who write ebooks have to be at their computer desk in order to construct new ideas and subject matter for their virtual book. On the other hand, creativity may strike others at any time. For the latter group of individuals, it is extremely important to stop what you are doing immediately and write down your ideas once they come to you. This will help to provide you with fresh and pertinent ebook material and prevent you from becoming the victim of writers block while sitting at your desk.

No matter whether you are lying in bed at night or shopping in a store when an ebook subject matter idea strikes you, try to find a pen and paper in order to write down your thoughts. This will pay off in the long run should you find that writers block occurs and you are unsure of what to write.

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Cory Threlfall - Rake In Real Cash 24/7 With Your Own Ebook Business In A Week From Now Using Ebook Money Machines ‘Step-By-Step’ Guide That Will Show You The Way To Building Your Ebook Empire Online! Go to ==> Create Ebooks or visit my Squidoo lens on Ebook Publishing at - Create Ebooks to get started.

Tags: ebooks, Writing

Recent research from Marketing Sherpa has pegged online shopping cart abandonment at almost 60 percent. That’s right - 60 percent!

Some advertisers will have their shopping cart right there on their landing pages. Others will link to it with a big BUY NOW button. Whatever method you use, the important thing is that you don’t contribute to the 60 percent fail statistic. Make sure your shopping cart process doesn’t sabotage the sales groundwork that your landing page has done for you.

Here are 17 tips to help you avoid shopping cart abandonment:

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Tags: Ecommerce, shopping cart abandoment

On page optimization is important with keywords, landing page, headers and alt tags all working in sync. There are a few tricks here and there to inch out the competition, however, if you want to dominate the search engines and your competition, offpage optimization is your golden ticket to internet supremacy! Offpage optimizing can be incredibly powerful if you keep the following in mind and in practice.

Linking your way up the Google ranks

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Tags: offpage search engine optimization, SE Positioning, SE Tactics

“The search landscape is evolving” - sure, we hear that everyday in this industry, but when you log on to Google, it’s hard to drink the Kool-Aid.  I have to admit, I think I’m finally starting to feel the “hype” thanks to some inspiriting things from the Yahoo camp.  When Yahoo said they were going to “Open Up”, I didn’t think they’d kick the barn doors open this wide, this fast.  This is exciting.  On the heels of SearchMonkey, Yahoo recently announced BOSS, another component of their “Y!OS”, or Yahoo Open Strategy.   I think vertical / social engines are finally going to get their 15 minutes, and I couldn’t be happier.

From Yahoo: BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search.  If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web.  The best way to make fast, impactful headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.  Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture.  With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that weren’t previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend.  Sure, there will be casualties, but it’s much less likely to be Yahoo if they’re the backbone to all these ventures.  Yahoo is probably thinking, “If we can’t beat them, we can be their engine.”

With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it’s logical that it will hit search in a big way.  The ball is rolling - the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.  Does that mean the noble intention of a human-maintained engine like Mahalo can be improved with social search?  I would think so.  I’m already pretty happy with the vertical search in my favorite social networks - I’m finding myself checking properties like Answers.com, LinkedIn, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Mixx before hitting Google when I know the kind of results I’m looking for (which is most the time).

If there’s one truism about the web, it’s that things move incredibly fast.  A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 - in web years, that’s incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago.  The novelty of bidding, and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad.  Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay’s efforts, Paypal, and users’ word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.  All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon.   The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks.  History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden.  In today’s web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.

So what if horizontal search continues to fall behind, and vertical / social hybrids become household names?  What does this mean for search marketing?  Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still offer many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly.   It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic.   That’s a huge benefit.  Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified.  SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it’s in now.  The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides.  SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics.  Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.  Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possible.

It’s an exciting time to be on the web.  It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding.  Last week Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform.  This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.

Bill Sebald is a search marketing consultant and enthusiast.  As a 10 year SEO, Bill writes about SEO 2.0 on his blog www.greenlaneseo.com/blog.

Tags: Google, search interface

If you run an affiliate program, but are struggling to get it off the ground, you can change that. You only really need a few dedicated affiliates to start making sales, and after that the affiliate program can actually grow itself automatically.

A little-acknowledged fact is that with many affiliate programs, the top 5% of affiliates make 95% of the affiliate sales. Indeed, with many affiliate programs that I’ve studied, the top 1% of affiliates make 95% of affiliate sales.

So, it’s not really a numbers game. It’s a matter of recruiting people who will actually promote the product effectively. The secret there is to make it really, really easy for them to promote your product.

I said earlier that it’s easy to have your affiliate program grow itself. The “secret” is to recruit your customers as affiliates. After a customer has used your product, and fell in love with it, they are ideal for telling others about it. So, why not send them a follow-up message (via autoresponder) telling them about your affiliate program.

What could be simpler?

Here’s an easy way to recruit those early affiliates. It’s actually a stealth affiliate recruiting SYSTEM

1) You create a short ebook related to the problem that your product solves. You can design this ebook to be sold, or given away.

2) In your ebook you recommend your product several times, as the logical solution to the problem that you’re writing about.

3) You turn this ebook into a “rebrandable ebook” meaning that you set it up so that those who get the ebook can change the links recommending your product to THEIR affiliate links.

4) You bundle the ebook in a zip file with a text file explaining how to rebrand the ebook AND how to join your affiliate program. In that file, you also generally include a software rebrander tool such as Viral Document Toolkit.

5) You join one of the many free giveaway sites that allow you to not only giveaway your products, but to grow your email list in the process.

With these giveaways, you typically require a visitor to the giveaway site to visit your site, and join your list in order to access your gift. This is how participating in these free giveaways allows you to grow your list.

6) You tell your list members, friends on sites such as Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, etc., about the free giveaway. You do this because the success of these free list-building giveaways depend upon contributors all spreading the word.

Contributors are generally rewarded for helping publicize the event on a point system. You earn points for recruiting new members (who come for the gifts), and for recruiting new contributors.

The more points you have, the higher up in the gift listings your gift appears. This is important because if a site has a LOT of free gifts, it’s very likely that many visitors are not going to sift through hundreds of listings. They’re going to look at the first few pages, grab the items that interests them, and perhaps never come back to download the gifts listed deeper within the site.

7) Thousands of visitors come to the giveaway site, and if your description is enticing enough, download YOUR rebrandable ebook.

They unzip your package, read the easy to follow instructions, register as your affiliate, rebrand the ebook with their affiliate links, and then begin selling or giving away your ebook.

When they begin distributing that ebook, they have begun actively promoting your product.

Do you see why I called this a “stealth affiliate recruiting system?”

Since they can earn money from the ebook, and since you make promoting your affiliate product as easy as perhaps offering your ebook from their blog or newsletter, you will have lots of new ACTIVE affiliates. They’ll be active because you made it almost no work.

Select the right free list-building giveaway, and you could easily recruit 500 new ACTIVE affiliates with very little work.

There you have it, a simple plan for growing your affiliate program faster than most people dare imagine is even possible. Now, if you don’t have a rapidly growing affiliate program, it’s because you simply won’t even do the EASY things to make it happen

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Willie Crawford is co-founder of The Viral Rebrandable Money Machines Giveaway, a free list-building giveaway that features ONLY rebrandable gifts. Register as a member or contributor to this free business building giveaway today at: http://ViralRebrandableMoneyMachines.net/

Tags: affiliate marketing, Marketing

If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings - the chances are that fewer people will find these items, and so they will be cheaper.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is - a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (”") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

So once you’ve found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don’t worry - eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we’ll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you’ll be prepared if the worst happens.

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Clint Herman is a successful eBay seller with over 6 years experience selling on eBay. He also loves teaching others how to sell on eBay. He is the author of “How to Get Started Selling on eBay,” which is a beginner’s guide to selling on eBay designed for people who are new to selling on eBay. The guide is available at http://www.beginnersauctionguide.com/ar.html

Tags: ebay tricks, Ecommerce, Marketing

Why is making videos an effective way to market your business and/or product? With hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube daily, it’s not surprising that thousands of videos are also being viewed daily. Many viewers watch YouTube as their main source of information, news and entertainment.

For those unfamiliar or new to internet marketing, YouTube is a popular video website service where ANYONE can upload videos for the viewing public. Although videos can be in any category with virtually unlimited topics, if you want to utilize YouTube to market your business or product, there are certain “tricks of the trade” that can be helpful.

Let’s face it, the point of uploading your video is to have people view it. Whether it’s to inform, educate or entice, your message won’t get delivered if no one is watching your video. So how can you increase your odds of having your video appear on page one, two or three on YouTube?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of YouTube, if you are looking to market using videos, you should be aware of a few things. First of all, it takes four to five weeks to build your presence on YouTube. Don’t expect to make sales after uploading one video in one week. Making videos is also another way to let your viewers know you before they ever pick up the phone to contact you. If they like you and/or your message, you will have a better chance of connecting with the viewer.

Viewers like to watch your videos or channel many times before they will even contact you. So it’s a good idea to have 10 videos or more in your arsenal. The more videos you have, the better your chances of someone watching them.

Also, since a prospect may wait two weeks to contact you, if they are serious and they are watching YouTube everyday, they will continue to see your videos pop up as they surf around. Generally, when they see many videos from one person, it will pique their curiosity and they will view your videos or channel. Having multiple videos will help build your presence on YouTube.

Now, back to making YouTube work for you. Prior to Google’s purchase of YouTube, video rankings were based on the number of views. Thus, the more views you had on your video, the higher percentage you had of that video being on the top pages of YouTube.

In response to that, what some entrepreneurs did to increase their chances of being on page one was purchase views from vendors. Sometimes these were real viewers, but more often than not, these were just numbers put up on the videos to make it appear as if real people were watching the video.

For example, if you see a video that was uploaded five days ago and there are 5,000 - 10,000 views, it is most likely that the views were purchased.

Since Google now owns YouTube, the previous rules no longer apply. Instead, searching for videos on YouTube is similar to Google’s search engine. For instance, if you were to type in GLOBAL RESORTS NETWORK, YouTube would display all the videos matching that title. Your video may appear on page one or page twenty.

So how do you get your videos to appear on the top pages? Google is now looking at the RELEVANCE of your video. So, in addition to the TITLES, Google also looks at the DESCRIPTION you’ve written for that video. If your description has little to do with your title, your video will mostly likely not be on the top pages.

For example, if your title is HOW TO SHOP FOR A SPONSOR, and your description talks about vacations, it’s obvious that the two do not compliment the other. Your title or key words you used in your title should appear several times in your description. So do yourself a favor and spend some time writing your descriptions. It should be a short summary of your video and should reflect your title.

You can also include some basic information about your product and/or company in your description. But it shouldn’t be the main thing you include in your description unless you are making a video just about your product or company.

Here are some additional tips for your descriptions. Always include your contact information (name, email, phone number, and website) at the beginning of your description.

Here’s how you should include your website: HTTP://WWW.YOURWEBSITE. If you don’t include the HTTP://, a hyperlink will not be created. You want your prospect to be able to click on it and go directly to your website.

Sometimes watching videos is an emotional response. Remember when I mentioned that some marketers will purchase views for their video? They do that because when a viewer is presented with SO MANY videos, most will likely click on a video that has more views. If you have hundreds or thousands of views, the viewer will think that since the number is so high, it must be a video worth watching.

You can find many vendors to purchase views from through the search engines. But if you do purchase views, be sure to place them carefully on your video. Put them on videos that have been uploaded 3-4 weeks ago. A video uploaded 3 weeks ago with 1,500 views is more believable than a video 5 days ago with 5,000 views.

There’s no time like the present to start marketing on YouTube. So start making your videos and don’t forget to include value added information. And lastly, HAVE FUN with your videos!

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Mree Vu is a top team trainer and is dedicated to mentoring her team to success. Discover Mree’s steps to success. Visit her at: http://www.stellarsuccess101.com

Tags: optimizing youtube, video marketing, Web 2.0

Times have changed. Just a couple short years ago, about 60% to 70% of your website ranking success depended on links. Now up to 85% of your page’s search engine rank on Google relates to how it is linked. More specifically, the quality and number of inbound links.

Google looks at everything from the “authority level” of the linked sites to their “PageRank” and even the IP class they use (Internet Protocol designation.) While we don’t have hours to get into every little detail, I have provided three simple surefire ways to get hundreds of top rate inbound links to any page or your site you wish. And this is the absolute fastest way to get on top of Google and stay there for the long haul. So, here we go…

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Tags: article writing, blog reviews, google linking strategies

There is always a lot of talk on SEO Forums about penalties. Recently there was some discussion about 3 specific Google penalties:

• The “-30 penalty”
• The “-950 penalty”
• Index Exclusion

There has been a lot of debate about whether the drop of a website’s rank by 30 or 950 spots in Google is really a penalty for unethical SEO tactics, or is it simply a result of an agorithm shift (and the particular site just didn’t measure up against the new algorithm so it dropped).

Many people insist there is no penalty (except Exclusion for really blatant “Black Hat” techniques), and rather it is all about Filters. If you do something that triggers a filter your site won’t rank as highly. Whether you call it a filter or a penalty, the results are the same. If you don’t follow best practices, sooner or later your site will be penalized or filtered out of the top rankings.

It is widely accepted that the -30 penalty affects the whole domain, however the -950 penalty only affects specific URLs for specific keywords.

Rather than actually moving your site back by precisely 950 spots, I think it is more likely that you are just going to be banished to the end of the results. It also appears to be specific to certain search queries. A site may go from first page to last page in the SERPs (search engine results page) on one keyword, and still hold a top ranking on another keyword.

Both of these penalties are associated with shady optimization practices. Some say these penalties happen when there is keyword stuffing, while some others say that these penalties are because of shady link building practices.

It is widely believed that getting too many links within a short time span and with similar anchors can raise red flags with Google. I personally believe this to be true and always tell people to be careful with their link acquisitions. Acquire links at a consistent, natural pace.

Google doesn’t believe that sites will naturally gain large numbers of links quickly, unless a software is being used and the system is being gamed. Google looks for what would naturally occur. Most people gain links over time as content spreads and it is rare to gain large numbers of links naturally in a short time period.

Another penalty is the Index Exclusion penalty or a complete ban. When a site gets hit with this Google throws the entire site and all their pages out of the Index.

This is reserved for sites that severely violate the quality guidelines and adopt black hat methods such as cloaking and doorway pages.

How Do You Avoid These Penalties?

• Build your website keeping the users in mind instead of the search engines.
• Do not stuff keywords in the page title, description, alt tags and in the content.
• Do not link out to link farms and sites engaged in link manipulation practices.
• Be consistent in building links and vary your link anchors as much as possible.
• Avoid cloaking & doorway pages

With proper on-page optimization and by following the tips above, your site should fare well in the engines and you should have nothing to worry about.

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Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Since 1998 Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter. Follow Jennifer and stay current on SEO, marketing, social media and more. http://twitter.com/EcomBuffet

Tags: Google, google penalty

June 30th 2008 was a day that Flash developers had been waiting for a long time; Google and Adobe had finally announced that Flash .swf files could be crawled by Google! In fact, the extensive news release from the Adobe Developer Center also stated that Yahoo would be incorporating similar technology in short order. When I read this news and the consequential articles from the web marketing community it became very clear that this update was a great step but far from the fix that some Flash developers are likely to pitch to their clients. As a result, I wanted to add my voice to the buzz on this topic and share with you my thoughts on how to optimize a site using Flash while considering the current updates.

What is Flash?
Okay, lets get down to basics. To introduce and establish what Flash is all about I am going to fall back on Wikipedia for a concise description:

“Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and, more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.” Source, Wikipedia

BEFORE: Search Engines Could Not Crawl Flash
Up until recently the textual content found in .swf Flash files was, for all intents and purposes, just as unreadable for search engine spiders as the text in images; only HTML text on a page could be read and indexed by search engine spiders because they could not yet (and still cannot) conduct on-the-fly optical character recognition.

To explain this differently I think of the HTML that spiders can read like the braille-like feeling of running your finger over a letter written in ball point pen; you can feel the contour of writing. Whereas something unreadable like Flash or an image on a page is like running your fingers along a 4×6 picture of a road sign… you won’t feel anything, so by the same token the text on that road sign cannot be read by a search engine spider.

NOW: Search Engines Can Crawl Text in Flash
For the first time, on June 30th, 2008 Google announced it could accurately spider the textual content hidden within Flash files found on the Internet. This major announcement was enabled by a partnership between Adobe, Google and Yahoo where Adobe provided their proprietary Flash Player technology to the search engines so they could integrate it into their systems and successfully ‘read’ the content within Flash files. This technology has vast implications for Google’s and soon Yahoo’s indexes because, at least in Google’s case, this allows the search engine to index the content within over 70.4 million Flash (SWF) files. That is a vast amount of content that was previously inaccessible to the search engines and the ability to access it could add a lot of value for search engine users.

For example, an inspiring and eloquent Flash site like Forests Forever could be indexed which would expose more viewers to a website that provides a wonderful introduction to the world’s forests. Of course that is just one Flash site of many that will add value to search engines when indexed; it just happens to be one of my personal favourites.

Search Engine Optimization Now Possible with Flash
The implementation of Flash crawling technology means that the text within Flash can now be indexed and links can be followed. Here are some examples of the basic optimization that is now possible within Flash:

• Optimizing page content for specific keyphrase(s) to ensure a visiting search engine bot will correctly perceive the page’s topic.
• Using keywords within internal links to pass link juice from page to page; only applicable for sites where the Flash pages are broken down onto separate URLs.
• Providing emphasis (bolding) to particular words may help to emphasize keyphrase(s); but I am reaching here… it is unknown if this new technology provides text-importance recognition.

The Limitations of Flash Search Engine Optimization
Now that you have some idea of what can now be optimized for search engines here are a few pitfalls that still limit the search engine friendliness of Flash:

1. Single URL Flash Websites: Many websites I encounter still incorporate all of the website in a single Flash file; in other words as a user navigates the site they are still using the same URL but different pages appear. In such an instance the search engines will index the content and potentially drive traffic to the site but as Google cannot link to content within a Flash file all users will be sent to the beginning of the file. That type of indirect search result is likely to infuriate many searchers who have come to expect immediate results.

   Here is a quote from Google’s comment area on this topic:

   “We’ve heard requests for deep linking (linking to specific content inside file) not just for Flash results, but also for other large documents and presentations. In the case of Flash, the ability to deep link will require additional functionality in Flash with which we integrate.”

   That last line is interesting because it leaves room for interpretation. Do they mean Adobe will have to add the “additional functionality” to Flash or that Google needs to beef up their indexing technology to take advantage of the existing Flash functionality? Perhaps some Flash gurus out there could weigh in on this one. It is definitely an ambiguous way for Google to answer the question.

   If you need a work-around to deep-link single SWF files Adobe notes a solution: “you can create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start your application at the correct subsection. By creating multiple entry points, you can get the benefits of a site that is indexed as a suite of pages but still only need to manage one copy of your application.”
   
   

2. Text in Images is Not Indexed: Many Flash websites inexplicably incorporate a great deal of textual content within images and currently search engines cannot index text in images; I expect that will remain true for at least another year or two. As a result, a Flash website that includes a vast amount of text within graphics will not see a noticeable benefit to this enhanced crawling technology.
3. Resource-File Based Content Not Indexed: I noted this in Google’s comment area from their support team: “At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We’ve noted this feature request from several webmasters — look for this in a near future update.”

In addition, Google’s news release announced the following limitations to Flash that Google expects to surmount soon (quoted from Google blog):

1. “Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”
2. “We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.”
3. “While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.”

Verdict: SEO for Flash is Still in Diapers
It is wonderful news that Flash is becoming more search engine friendly and there is no question that the addition of previously unattainable Flash content to search engine indexes will prove valuable. But the fact of the matter is that at this moment I wouldn’t dream of telling a client that Flash can be a competitive medium for search engine optimization. There are simply too many roadblocks that still exist and need to be addressed before a Flash website has any hope of competing with an HTML website on the basis of just search engine optimization. I do, however, see a couple exceptions to the rule:

1. At a certain point a threshold can be met where significant incoming links can push even the most un-search engine friendly website to the top rankings. As a result, it is highly likely that some Flash websites with a decent incoming link support structure will see vast improvements in rankings when their content is finally considered thanks to this new crawling technology.
2. In less competitive arenas (obscure keyphrases or keyphrases with little competition) the basic search engine optimization capabilities opened to Flash may very well be all that is needed to attain top search engine rankings.

In conclusion I would like to pass on extreme kudos to Adobe, Google and Yahoo for working this new technology into their systems. With all of the new multimedia formats coming online it has always seemed quite silly to me that Flash, having been around for years, was still not fully indexable. Thankfully Flash can now be crawled and the day where it could potentially compete for competitive rankings is on the distant horizon.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

Tags: flash marketing, google indexing flash