Good Website Navigation – An SEO Perspective

You can have a great website with lots of good content. But, if search engine spiders visit your site and can’t access it, you lose! Some thoughtful planning can help avoid that scenario. Make sure you don’t use navigation technology that will interfere with a spider’s attempt to crawl your site. Avoid Java script based navigation, Flash-based navigation and Ajax-based navigation.  Instead consider using CSS (cascading style sheets), which spiders can easily crawl. Add traditional hypertext navigation as a footer. And, be sure to create a site map and make it accessible from every page in your website! For more on this, take a look at Darrell Long’s article in MediaPost’s Search Insider, “Don’t Let Navigation Be Your Downfall“.

Using Video To Engage Customers

Here’s a simple case study from Google on how to easily and cost effectively utilize online video advertising to sell your products and services.

Google will even assist with the production of a video, which is done through their network of approved vendors.

Universal Search: What It Means for Marketers

Google announced last week that they will begin incorporating some of their vertical and specialized search results into their “main” search engine results page. Currently, this means that search results that may have previously appeared only within Google Video, Google News, Google Local and Google Books are now beginning to appear within the “regular” search results. This has been dubbed, “Universal Search”.

What does it mean for marketers? If your website normally appears on the first page of a Google search for a particular keyword or phrase, there’ a good chance that the addition of these new vertical results could push your first page position to the second page. For marketers it means that search engine optimization just got harder.

So what can marketers do to leverage this change? The key is to take advantage of Google vertical/specialized search services. Upload videos to Google Video and YouTube, distribute press releases to Google News, list your business in Google Local, etc. That way you’ll have a chance that your vertical listings will be included on a Universal Results page if they are relevant for a particular search.

Flash: A Great Website Design Tool With One Exception

This exception is important if your website is part of a business dependent on targeted prospects/traffic for leads and sales. Search traffic is by far the most important source of new, targeted traffic flowing to most websites. But, websites built in Flash loose out on this traffic because they cannot be effectively indexed by search engines.

Stories abound, such as the one in the LA Times, West Magazine yesterday entitled, “Flash Forward” (Sunday, May 13), about the power and impact of Flash. But, readers are often left with the opinion that a website developed in Flash is the gold standard. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash. But, I know its short-coming. If you want to take advantage of the tremendous potential of search engines to deliver targeted traffic to your website, you don’t want to build your site in Flash. Embed Flash modules within the site to engage people through motion and sound. But, don’t be confused about using Flash within your site and building an entire website in Flash.