Advertising agencies love Flash sites because you can create a visually rich presentation experience that is unique and fresh. Many brands love Flash for the same reasons. But Flash has come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons. From a workflow perspective, Flash is such a controlled environment that it is much more difficult to add content and new navigation items than is possible with a content managed HTML site. And from a search engine perspective, Flash doesn’t help your efforts to be discovered.

You can have your Flash and find it too, if your flash site is built with an understanding of what the search engines can and cannot read. For example, text that is embedded in your Flash files can be indexed by Google, but text that is pulled in from an external data source is not.

It is vital that your site’s search engine results create an optimized presentation of your content. You want each search result to link to a state within Flash that you determine. Also, each section of content should have its own URL, so that it appears in the search engine as a separate result.

If you build a Flash site, it’s very important to offer an alternative HTML content site so that users who do not have a Flash plug-in can still view your content. The experience won’t be the same, but it can still be good.

Finally, consider the option of using Flash judiciously as elements within a site. You can create rich, interactive experiences within a page, and offer alternative static images or javascript-energized code as a replacement for those who aren’t flash-ready. This is perhaps the most viable option, and certainly my favorite, because you can have the benefits of Flash while making the rest of your site easy to manage and update.

The state of Flash and Search is constantly changing. What is impossible today, might be trivial in another year. It’s important to keep up with the latest changes and adjust your online strategy to exploit the best opportunities. Everybody has a favorite Flash site. What’s yours?

You might love to write or perhaps you write because it’s a part of your job. Conversational writing has exploded in importance since the advent of blogs and the love that search engines show toward original content. Not everyone is a natural storyteller, but anyone can learn to write great articles. Follow these 8 steps and you will be well on your way to writing articles that people enjoy reading and learning from.

1. Focus on your Objectives. Every article should have a clear objective before you begin. Do you want to discuss the advantages of a product or service? Do you want to motivate your audience to take action? The objective will tell you which direction the article will move in, and will give you something to measure your success against. Objectives should be simple and direct. In this article, the objective is to give a sequential list of activities that will help you, the reader, write better articles. An objective does not need to be any more complex. The more complex you make your objective, the harder it is to achieve.

2. Know your Audience. Are you writing for junior high school students, or for pharmaceutical sales professionals? Is your audience primarily located in the USA or are they located in other countries? Your audience will determine the kind of language you use and the reading level you will target. The spelling of common words can be different, and some references, such as the grade level of students, is unique to different locations. It is best to choose words that are the least confusing when writing to a mixed audience. If you write at a slightly lower reading level than your intended audience, readers will thank you for your clarity and simplicity.

3. Determine your Message. What is the one idea you want your reader to walk away with? A message, like your objective, should be simple and direct. If your objective is to discuss how Duracell batteries are better than other batteries, your message might be “Duracell batteries are a better value because they consistently outlast similarly priced batteries by 25% or more.” With this message in the reader’s mind, they’re more likely to choose Duracell batteries when making a purchase decision, as long as they are priced the same as their competitors.

4. Choose your Delivery Style. You can be humorous, entertaining, factual, informative, persuasive, analytical, passionate, sarcastic, or a combination of styles. Your delivery style should suit the objective, audience, and message. By personalizing an article with style, it helps the readers connect with the writer. A distinctive delivery style may even become a writer’s brand and readers will expect every article from that author to have the same style. This is great for developing a following, but can also polarize readers into groups who love and groups who hate the writer’s style.

5. Prepare your Material. Assuming you are not writing a story based on personal experience or a fictional account, you will need to research your subject. Checking facts, finding expert accounts, gaining new insights is what attracts many writers to the process of writing articles. It is rewarding to discover information that most people don’t realize and then pass it along in the context of your article. The better you prepare your material, the more you will have to work with when it’s time to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard.

6. Organize your Ideas. For many writers who are first starting out, organizing an article can be the most difficult challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. There are various ways of doing this, from making a simple list to creating mind-maps where ideas are organized around a central themes and sub-themes. In the end, you will finalize with a sequence of items that tell the story of your article, starting with the major themes or commonly held beliefs, and ending with the message you want to leave as the strongest impression on your reader’s mind.

7. Write your Article. Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, it will be easy to write your article. You know what you want to say, whom you want to say it to, how you want to say it, and where you want to end. You only need to guide your reader through the thought process that you have laid out for them, using the delivery style that you have chosen, or that your readers expect from you.

8. Edit and Publish. You should never publish an article immediately after writing it. Even seasoned writers will make mistakes and overlook them during a review. Ideally, you have someone who can read your article for you and catch any errors. More often than not, this is a luxury that writers cannot afford. In this case, it’s best to put down the article and do something else for an hour or more, then return to read as if you’re reading it for the first time. If you find mistakes, correct them and walk away again. Repeat this process until you can make two complete reat-throughs without any revisions. You will be surprised how many times you will catch simple errors.

Anyone can write memorable articles that people enjoy reading and learn from. Following these 8 steps, you can do it too!

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

Anyone who builds a new website today quickly realizes that it’s nearly impossible to get noticed without making some substantial efforts. You can market your website using traditional marketing promotions, but these only work while the program is running. Using the web to grow your long tail visibility will increase your exposure long after the campaign has ended. Long tail marketing requires time and effort, but the lasting benefits provide great value to your web presence.

Web Directories
Web directories provide reference and contact information about your business. It is likely that your business is already listed in many popular web directories but those listings are incomplete. This is due to the way directories are initially created from public domain sources. Your job is to find the web directories where you are listed and enhance the listing with additional descriptive information, including a URL to your business website. You might not have a top-ranked site, but the web directory entry for your site might bring your customers one click closer to you.

Social Bookmarking Sites
While web directories are created from information that has been collected elsewhere, social bookmarking sites aggregate the personal web directories of many individuals. The idea behind social bookmarking is that I might share interests with you, and you might have sites bookmarked that I would like, so if you share your bookmarks, I can see which sites you think are important. Social bookmarking gives people an additional way to find your site.

Leveraging Content Aggregators
Sites like YouTube, Flickr, and DeviantArt are content aggregators because they offer unlimited space for anybody to upload and share their content. Often, people will upload to a content aggregator and then share a link to the content on their site, creating an outbound link. But within the sites themselves, you can create a user profile that includes a description of your business and a link to your website. Content aggregators will help you connect with different audiences and can increase awareness of your business.

Creating Original Content for High Authority Sites
The most valuable inbound links come from high traffic sites with a reputation for having high quality and authoritative content. If you establish yourself as an authority in your field by creating high quality content that is popular or informative with internet users, you can increase your visibility by offering to develop content for high profile sites to be published with a byline briefly describing your business and including your website address.

Encouraging RSS Subscriptions
When another website publishes an RSS feed of your website, each article of the feed will have an inbound link to your site. Every published RSS feed will evangelize your brand and increase your visibility. Optimize your blog format for RSS and you will more likely encourage others to publish your feed.

Blog and Forum Participation
This is perhaps the best way to increase visibility. There are literally millions of blogs and forums that you can participate with. Spend a few hours or days researching these resources to find the most active and relevant places for your participation. Develop a reputation on the sites as someone who is helpful and authoritative, and nobody will mind an occasional plug for your website. Just don’t overdo it. Community members recognize when someone is just there to push their products and they will be left with a negative impression rather than the positive one that you should cultivate.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it should give you a good start on your web marketing program. As the web continues to evolve, some of these approaches may lose favor, and others may appear that are not yet popular. What are you doing to build your long tail web presence?

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

When I focus on search engine marketing, I generally concern myself with 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, because I like to start by following the 80/20 rule and give my attention on the top 80% of the search traffic. Acording to J.P. Morgan research, Google is the most popular search engine with 59% of all search traffic. Yahoo comes in second at 20%, and MSN is in third place at 7.7%. These numbers are important because they tell where people go to search, but they’re also important for a formula I created to rank search engine competition on a given term. This formula can be described as follows:

RP is the search results position
PV is the position value
EP is the engine popularity
RV is the rank value
CR is the competition rating

PV = 100/RP
RV= PV * EP
CR = SUM(RV)

If this appears confusing, it may be that you’re like me, and worked on other things during algebra class, but I can explain the formula by showing how it works with an example.

Berkley-Fishing.com is #3 on MSN, #5 on Yahoo, and #5 on Google. By taking the percentage of market share for each search engine and multiplying it by .01, we get the EP values for each search engine. The EP values are .077 for MSN, .2 for Yahoo, and .59 for Google. The PV (position value) is determined by dividing 100 by the results position. This produces a fractional number that is suitably weighted to reflect the significance of the highest positions in RP. For Berkley-Fishing.com, the PV is 33.33 on MSN, 20 on Yahoo, and 20 on Google. Rank value is the position value adjusted by the engine popularity, or share of audience that the search engine has. To determine Berkley-Fishing.com’s RV for Google, we take the position value which is 20 and multiply it by Google’s Engine Popularity, which is .59. The result is 11.8, meaning the RV for Berkley-Fishing.com on Google is 11.8. We repeat this formula for each of the other search engines, substituting the new RP and EP numbers, and sum the results to get the overall Competition Rating, or CR. The CR result for Berkley-Fishing.com is 18.37.

You are welcome to do this exercise on your own, but I have already done the work for you. Here are the individual search engine results and their calculated values for the term “fishing line”.

MSN Bing Search Engine Results

Yahoo Search Engine Results

Google Search Engine Results

Fishing Line Manufacturers Rated by Search Engine Position and Relative Competition Score

From a search engine marketing perspective, we now have a clear picture of who the competition is. If your brand is nearer to the bottom of this list, you no doubt want to know why these various competitors rank so high? For that answer, we have to dig much deeper, looking at each site to understand how search engine factors have determined their ranking. We can do this because search engines try to think like people, albeit algorithmically, and so they try to analyze what the web designer intended and what the person searching wants to find. We just need to know what to look for, and how to think more like a search engine. We’ll save this next step for another post.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

It’s easy to optimize brands for their name. Type Berkley Fishing into any search engine and you’ll see www.berkley-fishing.com at the top of your search results. Optimizing for a product category can be much more challenging, as you have to compete not only with other sites that mention your product, but sites who talk about the category in general as well as every other brand with a similar product.

To compete for product category positioning, you need to identify the most popular search terms people are using to search for products like yours. We’ll use the example of fishing line. There are many manufacturers of fishing line, and the fishing enthusiast community is massive. Someone wanting to optimize for “fishing line” will be competing with informational websites, enthusiast websites, retail chains and other brands. You have a slim chance for gaining the #1 position, but you can be first among competing manufacturers. This is helpful because sometimes people want to find out where they can get the best deal on fishing line, and sometimes they’re more interested in learning about different kinds of fishing line. This is where your brand can compete. If you provide great informational content and can effectively communicate your product’s advantages, you will create a strong and positive brand impression. You may not be #1 for the search term, but you can still be #1 for the people who are seeking brand information.

Fishing line is an obvious choice product category for fishing line manufacturers who want to rank high for their product category. But what about other possible terms? What about “best fishing line” or “bass fishing line”? Should these terms also be considered? And if yes, should they be given equal or more effort than “fishing line”? It’s worth finding out.

Evaluating search term popularity is an essential early step in your optimization effort. Simply put, you might think you know what people are searching for, but that may not always be the case. Using a keyword analysis tool, I determined that “bass fishing line” is more popular than “trout fishing line”, but “best fishing line” is more popular than both by a 2:1 margin. That is good information, but even more important is to recognize that our original term, “fishing line” is 40 times more popular than “best fishing line”. In this case, we want to focus on “fishing line” as our key term.

With our keyword properly identified, we now want to discover whom we’re competing against. Typically, you want to look at the top 20 positions in each of the major search engines, though if you are not ranked in the top 20, you may want to look further. Every gain that you make will directly influence the traffic your website generates from search results. The following results show how much traffic can be gained by advancing into the top 10 of Google’s rankings, and the impact of gaining even one position higher in the top 10.

Google’s Search Rankings

That’s a lot of information to digest for one post. Next, we’ll look at who the competitors are, and try to determine how they have earned a strong position in the search engines.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

You may think that good writing is good content when it comes to websites, especially if it engages the reader. While that may be true, there’s nothing better than good writing that people come across easily because it’s composed in a way that search engines love. The best way to improve your chances of being discovered by readers is to write the kind of copy that search engines eat like candy. If this sounds intriguing to you, then read on.

You need to start with keywords. A keyword is a term that people search for, and that is relevant to your client’s product or service. You want to identify the keyword that you are most likely to get results with, which usually means it has a high search/competition ratio. The more often a term is searched and the lower the competition, the better your results will be. You can research keywords with Google’s keyword tool.

When you compose a topic, make sure you use the keyword in your title. This is very important. You also want to think about synonyms for your keyword. In the case of this article, the keyword I am optimizing for is the phrase search engines. As I write, I want to mention this term, as well as words like searches and phrases like search engine results. Ultimately, my goal is to populate the copy with at least a few occurrences of the term, but not over-saturate my copy with it. I should mention that there are other words in this article that are also being optimized, including copy, article, and keyword. There is some argument about the appropriate word density, but in my experience, an average of around 6-7% is more likely to earn higher search engine rankings.

Once your copy is written, there are a few more steps that you want your webmaster to follow through with. A picture might be included in your post, and in the HTML code, you will want to provide text that will act as a substitution for the picture, if the picture can’t be loaded. In code-speak, this is called ALT text. The ALT text should include your keyword or key phrase. Also, your webmaster should provide links from your article to other articles on the website, and those articles should contain at least one instance of the keyword. Your webmaster should format the title using an H1 tag, and make one occurrence of your keyword bold, using the bold tag. It is important that these steps are done, but not overdone. Otherwise, the search engine algorithms will not take your copy seriously. The idea is to make your copy appear to be relevant and important, using the few semantic devices available to the search engine robots.

There’s one more step to this Ninja tactic. You want to create inbound links to your copy once it’s published on the website. If you know people who are highly interested in the subject of your article and write blogs or articles, ask them if they’d be interested in mentioning your copy and linking to it. This creates an inbound link from another person’s website. Even if you don’t know someone, you can still create inbound links yourself. There are more than 100 million blogs out there, and surely there are a few active blogs that your article is relevant to. If that blog allows comments, you can write a comment that references your story, and create a link to it. In time, the search engine spiders will find this link, and recognize that it connects to your article, sweetening your popularity.

There is no guarantee that your article will become #1 in Google’s rankings, or anyone else’s, but you will improve your results by following these steps as they are outlined here. It may seem unfair or even corrupt to write copy that influences the search engines, but is that any less fair than writing copy that influences readers? I don’t think so.

For another perspective on blogging, please consider this article.

I think the list ranking is more a reflection of popularity and the result of SEO becoming embedded in the process of online marketing. At some point, all SEO activities become a habit like buckling the seat belt when you sit behind the wheel of a car. It’s not something you think about, it’s just something you do. The new activities that you establish are the ones you think about.

Still, the list is a good indicator of what you should be doing to promote your brand. If you’re not already engaged in social media, you need to start now, by first tackling the top 5 and then considering how you could engage in the rest of the top 10.

• Blogging (34%, 183 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter) (29%, 155 Votes)
• Search engine optimization (28%, 151 Votes)
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%, 137 Votes)
• Email marketing (17%, 90 Votes)
• Social media monitoring & outreach (17%, 88 Votes)
• Pay per click (14%, 73 Votes)
• Blogger relations (12%, 64 Votes)
• Video marketing (10%, 51 Votes)
• Social media advertising (7%, 39 Votes)

You can see the entire list at http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/02/reader-poll-top-digital-marketing-tactics-for-2009/