Blog

To Flash or Not to Flash

This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

In a keyword-centric universe, interactive or animated content like Flash can be problematic. We generally don’t recommend that companies who are selling online and competing for keywords build their sites in Flash. Although Adobe recently announced full support for keywords in Flash, it’s unclear how much re-authoring of content is required to make this happen.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use Flash at all. Flash is very effective in an embedded format, when it is simply another element on a page. Many of our customers use Flash banners on their homepages or other areas of their sites to highlight products or specials, or to show a product in a more attractive, animated presentation. Embedding other multimedia content, such as product videos or interactive features, can also be a very effective way to keep audiences engaged. If the content is strong, you shouldn’t worry about the impact on your keywords. Just make sure the rest of the page and the site is built with keyword content in mind.

Categories: Articles

More Keyword Help

This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

So, you’ve done the “uniqueness” exercise and you’ve got your site built with appropriate keywords, but you’re still not getting much search traffic. What’s going wrong? Well, beyond the sheer volume of competition that’s likely fighting for those words, you may be simply using ineffective keywords. Sometimes it’s difficult to predict what real users are actually searching for, and it could be that your words – as meaningful as they may be to your business – are not particularly effective for searches.

Thankfully, Google provides a free tool to help you generate keywords. Available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, Google’s Keyword Tool can take your basic keywords and show you alternatives, along with their potential search traffic. The tool is built primarily for pay-per-click advertisers looking to generate keyword lists for their advertising campaigns, but it’s also an effective way to see what users are searching for. The Keyword Tool is one of a list of many free tools I’ll discuss in the coming months to assist you in your search engine optimization.

(more…)

Categories: Articles

Jott comes out of Beta

One of my favorite “hybrid” web services, Jott, has come out of beta. This is good and bad news – good because the service is very mature and stable, bad because you now have to start paying (just a little bit) for it. For those of you who haven’t tried Jott, it’s essentially a speech-to-text service that allows you to call in notes, messages, to-dos and reminders to a phone number. Jott then transcribes the voice message and sends it to you (or a variety of other services, like your online calendar). It’s a great service when you can’t type a message – for instance, when you’re driving – and the transcriptions are almost always accurate. I use it almost every day, and I recommend you try it out if you spend any substantial time thinking away from a keyboard.

Categories: General