Flash pages still won’t get high rankings on Google
Some webmasters prefer to have a pure Flash website because they can look very impressive. Although Google can index Flash content to some extend, it is very unlikely that a Flash page will get high rankings on Google.
The problem:
Flash content cannot be indexed by search engines. If your website is a pure Flash site, then you can be sure that search engines won’t be able to see 95% of your website content.
Google has several official statements regarding Flash content:
“Search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. [...] Any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines. [...]
We recommend that you use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, and instead use HTML for content and navigation.”
“Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash.
This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can’t view Flash.”
Adding your content in the noscript tag won’t help
Theoretically, adding your web page content in the noscript tag on your web pages should make sure that search engines get the right content. Unfortunately, Google’s John Mueller indicates that this doesn’t work anymore:
“One of the problems with noscript is – as others have mentioned – that it’s been abused quite a bit by spammers, so search engines might treat it with some suspicion.
So if this is really important content, then I wouldn’t rely on all search engines treating your noscript elements in the same way as normal, visible, static content on your pages. If this is ‘just’ for comments, then that might be worth considering.”
What does this mean to your website
If you want to get a reasonable amount of visitors through search engines, don’t use Flash and other multimedia elements for the main contents of your web pages:
Only use Flash for decorative purposes.
The navigation of your website should use regular HTML a href links. Do not use fancy JavaScript or Flash navigation menus. Most search engines cannot parse them.
The main content of your web pages should be available as simple text.
People like to believe that they are going to get something for less than everyone else. In other words, people want to think that if they buy the product, they are getting it for cheaper than someone else. They want to think that they gamed the system and that they are “special.”
Understanding that psychological aspect to the game makes it so that the seller can increase the number of products that they sell. By understanding that the buyer wants the most bang for their buck, and that a coupon reduces the price and therefore provides that increased bank, a seller can increase the amount of money they’re going to make from selling their product.
Take for example, two coupons that I offer on one of my websites. One of them is a 10% coupon for Island Surf and the other is a 20% coupon for Navteq. Now, these two companies are not making as much potential profit on the sale of their items because they are cutting their revenue by 10-20%. However, they are actually making more money because they are giving away the coupon. Here’s why…
In economics, there’s a fine line between price and revenue. If you price something too high, sure, you make a lot of money for every one item sold, but you don’t sell as many products. If you price something too low, sure, you sell a ton of items, but you don’t really make all that much money per item. If you price it just right—that happy medium between high and low—then you make the most because you are selling the optimal amount of product for its price.
Another reason that you might give a coupon away is because you want to increase the overall purchase size. It’s better if a customer spends $125 instead of $100, even if you had to take 25% off the overall purchase. If you’ve got that extra $25 coming in, that’s good. What a coupon does is create a scenario where more money is being spent because the customer believes they are getting a better deal. So, they spend more which means you bring in more money…
If you’re pricing items correctly and the coupon isn’t too great, that means more profit. Just because the profit per item is lower, the total profit is actually higher because you generated more revenue.
Your best bet is to price your item and see how it does. If it is selling like mad, you might have priced the item too low or you’ve already found your perfect price range. However, if you’re not getting very many sales, release a coupon. Maybe it’s 10% or maybe it’s more. But, release the coupon and see what it does for your sales.
Chances are, you’ll see more people buying it because it falls into their price range and suddenly, they are more excited. And since they are “gaming the system,” they’ll feel that emotional and psychological connection to getting it. And that’s where you walk away with more sales.
Why else do you think so many companies around the world utilize coupons? They work!
Jay is an Internet marketer who specializes in helping businesses increases sales. One of the sites he runs often times has coupons and discounts for products such as Navteq and Island Surf. Visitors are able to find islandsurf.com coupons and navteq promo that really help users save money.
]]>We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.
Posted by Susan Moskwa
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Are you working on this? How do you give your users what they want?
ps: Is it summer already Matt 
Color Contrast
Something I am working on lately is brushing up some of my websites. Getting them better logo’s, better color contrasts etc. The thing I am noticing is that more people are sharing the websites now on facebook, twitter and other social media websites.
People want to hang around nice sites that gives them a good vibe. Good color contrasts and a great logo will help your site getting more social shares / links for sure.
Check this mood ring with color meanings I talked about earlier. This helps you understand the different values of the colors.
Take action
Check your websites and see if they could use better color contrasts or an improved logo. If you want more social shares / links this is a good start!
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The balls at this picture are ‘Oliebollen’, I don’t know the exact english term for it or that it even exists in English 
They are pretty good though and made them at the last day of 2010. You shouldn’t eat too much of these though, when you have some beers afterwards they are going to float, and you don’t want that
2010
A year with ups and downs. Learned a lot, didn’t make big money though. Learned some important life lessons.
2011
Finish school is something I need to do this year. If I don’t finsh it I have to pay a € 3000 fine. So I better finish it.
New websites are on the way. We got some pretty cool ideas that are in development now and showing good progress. I will keep you guys updated!
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Google Rank Checker
Wouldn’t it be great if you had a tool that monitors all your search engine ranks for your main keywords? It probably would be great! There are already a couple of tools that deliver this service, but didn’t discovered one that really does a good job at a good price (there are some good ones, but way too expensive).
That’s the reason why Tycho and I are going to release another SEO tool (for checking your Google ranks). It is in development at the moment and not too far away from completion. We plan to launch it early 2011. I will give more updates on this new project on this blog before we launch it.
Blue Backlinks
Blue Backlinks is stable at the moment and doing a good job as backlink checker. We had some small server issues in the last month but those are all fixed now. It got over 100,000 pageviews in the last 30 days which is awesome!
By the way, this blog almost reached its 200th comment. The person who makes it will receive a free review of his or her website!
]]>These signals are mostly used in the real-time search index but they are studying how they may expand it more into other areas of search, including web search.
Matt Cutts warns that you should not just go out and get tons of follower because it won’t help you rank well. What will help is getting followers that have good reputation.
Use Whois Protection
For all new projects I am using whois protection now. With past projects I never really cared about the whole thing, but I just noticed my full name, mail address and phone numbers are on several sites. I think my daily spam of 20+ messages are mostly from this cause.
My recommendation
Protect your whois, it’s damn cheap to protect and your info will stay secure!
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How to Win it
To win this brand new iPad you have to blog about Blue Backlinks. You either write a review about Blue Backlinks or you mention it in one of your upcoming blog posts, for example dedicate a paragraph to it. The blog post or paragraph should be at least 200 words and contain at least 1 link to Blue Backlinks with the following details:
Anchor Text: Backlink Checker
Link: http://www.bluebacklinks.com
Important: When your blog post / paragraph is online, make sure you comment on this post with the location of your blog post / paragraph so we can check it and include you to the list of participants!
Note: The topic / niche of your blog does not matter, just stick to the few rules above and you are in!
Contest Period
The contest will start when this post is published and will end November 15 at 0:00. Every entry has the same chance to win. The winner will be picked using a random generator from random.org and will be announced on this blog. After that, we contact the winner and will ship the Apple iPad free of charge.
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