Online Top 10 Retailers: What We Can Learn

Take a look at the Top 10 Online Retailers for December. You can find the info at Marketing Charts.com. First thing to notice— the list relies on conversion statistics not total sales. That measure of success, reiterates the importance of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Also notice the conversion percentages  ranging from 19 to 31%.  That’s pretty good, especially when research from Fireclick tells us the average conversion rate hovers between 2 and 3%.  Imagine the impact of a 10% conversion rate increase for your small business’s revenue.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, let’s look at some things you can replicate in your site, that may help increase your conversion rate.

Keyword Ads Link to Product Pages

The right keyword text, linking to the right landing page. When the user clicks on keyword text that says ‘luxurious lingerie’ , they don’t land in the soap section of victoriassecret.com. They don’t land at the home page either. If the visitor searches for potatoes, they want potatoes.

Graphics Heavy Home Pages

All the big winners had very graphic intensive home pages. The text explained large graphics highlighting featured products.  Outside of that, very little text. Its all about the visual and pushing product. Be assured that the featured items are most likely proven sellers.

Unique Page Titles

Every page has a unique title.  Product pages were titled with their respective product names. They do this because page title holds a high priorty in page rankings. Make sure your ecommerce application allows you to use product names as page titles. 

Alt tags for Every Image

All images posses ‘alt’ text. Another SEO strategy,  alt text influences search engine page ranking.

Products to the Left, Checkout to the Right

All the product pages held true to form– product image on the left, description, size charts, colors and checkout on the right. Visitor attention tends to gravitate towards the visual first. Marketing research suggests that users have a harder time moving from right to left, than left to right. Looks like our top ten retailers saw the same study.

The Conversion Lynch Pin: Understanding Search Habits

All these retailers understand the search habits of online buyers.  They search based upon specifics, not generalities. A web buyer looking for shoes, generally will search for a specific shoe type– ‘xj7 running shoe’, ‘rockport men’s dress shoes’. Knowing this, its better to focus your ecommerce SEO efforts on your product and category pages, not just the home page.

Ramping Up
You’ve got almost a full year until the next Christmas shopping season. Start implementing changes now. Starting now gives you the opportunity to test what works best. It also allows you to evaluate your ecommerce application. Make sure it automates things like page titles and alt tags. If not, check the upgrades or another vendor.

By the time the heavy shopping traffic begins, you’ll be in prime position to convert visitors into revenue.

Get It In Writing

I just finished reading Startup Daddy’s post, Starting A Business: Define Your Definite Major Purpose & Envision Your Desired Outcome. The post focuses on the concept of defining one’s purpose, as in what’s your purpose in going into business. It speaks about the importance of defining one’s goals, both personal and professional, and how that helps in selecting your niche.

New web entrepreneurs often ignore this step when building a new website. You need to establish your site’s purpose. If you don’t, you risk a lack of focus that will cascade throughout your web presence, inhibiting SEO planning,  online marketing efforts and many times delaying site completion. You can’t select the best keywords, write good ad copy or build effective conversion paths without site focus.

Just like your business, your website needs a sound plan. That plan should be built before you ever speak with a web designer. In business its called a business plan. In the techie world, we call that plan a requirements document.

Building the Document, Then the Website

Start your document off with a purpose– literally.  Write down a few sentences about your business. In this summary include what you do, how you do it and your market segment. Don’t forget to include any differentiators.

Follow this with a short paragraph about the reasons you desire a website. Try to match your need for a website, with the summary of your business. This purpose will provide scope to your web project.

Determine Required Site Sections

List out all the sections that need to be included in your site. If you can diagram them using Visio or some other tool, that would be great.

Next you want to describe the pages to be included in each section. The ‘Services’ section of your site will have a Services landing page, and most likely a page for each Service you offer. 

Now list what you want included on each of the pages listed under each section. Include images, cross promotion, forms or widgets.  For forms and widgets, be specific about what functionality should be included.  For forms list the fields that should be included, what to do with the form information and designate required fields.

Add the Icing

Now list pages, content or functionality that would be nice to have, but not mission critical. This might seem like wasted effort, but it helps to understand future goals when designing your current website.

Now You’re Covered

Your requirements document provides insurance on your design investment. When working with a professional web designer or firm, you have more security. Get the designer to sign the form, recognizing it represents what will be delivered.  This prevents confusion with billing. It also helps recuperate penalty fees for missed deadlines.

5 Reasons You Will Use Hiconversion in 2009

Take note of the term Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). During the down economy, CRO will justify itself more than any other online marketing strategy. The reason being, CRO proves what online marketing strategies produce revenue.

Thinning budgets demand improved ROI. Quite simply, businesses can’t afford to waste resources. Money will not be spent without strong justification. CRO provides the best means to test, measure and justify online marketing strategies.

CRO has been slow to take hold. Mainly due to a lack of affordable choices, and reliable expertise. Until recently choices have been limited to free applications— such as Google’s Website Optimizer, or investing in high end enterprise applications costing thousands.

Zee Agonovic, the CEO of Hiconversion, a CRO software development company, sees CRO taking center stage very quickly.

“Online marketers are putting the cart before the horse,” he stated in our recent conversation., “All the money and effort is spent on generating web traffic and very little, if anything, is done about visitor conversion”. It doesn’t matter how many users visit your page, if they never take the next step.

After having the opportunity to see Hiconversion’s tool first hand, here’s five reasons you’ll be using Hiconversion in 2009.

1. Improves Online Marketing ROI

With Hiconversion, you get the CRO benefits, at a much lower cost, with less complexity and a higher level of reliability than any other tool on the market.

2. Works with Low traffic volumes

Hiconversion’s patented algorithms don’t require large volumes of traffic. If your site generates 100 hits per day, you can get reliable data, and improve conversion rates.

3. Easy Setup

Hiconversion utilizes a service based model, like Google’s Weboptimizer. There are no installs— you create an account online and begin testing. Creating multivariate tests has been reduced to simple point and click functionality.  The tool provides the ability to create an unlimited number of test pages, for as many pages as you want.  The tool gives you the capability to test unlimited page element combinations via a graphical interface. You can test entire conversion paths, almost eliminating the need for more complicated analytics reports.

4. Quick Results

With low site volume, 100 clicks per day, you can get reliable results within weeks. With 1000 clicks per day or higher, you get reliable data within days. Many users of the tool start seeing improved conversion rates before they even complete their testing periods. Hiconversion also comes with a complete set of out-of-the-box reports, including real-time and projected ROI analysis.

5. Fits Your Budget

At $99  per month, you can’t find a better way to invest your money. You can get turnkey CRO services  starting at just $995 per project, with a 10% CR increase guarantee.

Setting Up a Test

Experiment Results

ROI Report

Variation Importance Results

Reports: Best Peformer

10 Tips to Improve eCommerce Sales

The holiday buying season has come and gone. Now its back to the day-to-day grind in terms of sales. What little money many consumers had, has been spent. So now we need to really focus on converting visitors to buyers.

Once you implement your marketing strategy, its time to find ways to close the deal. Internet retailing relies heavily on your technical infrastructure and store design. I’ve formulated ten tips gathered from advice by the biggest players in the eCommerce space. Read now, and you’ll find a bonus tip:

1. Identify Your Top Searches

Plain and simple, you will need to be customer focused to be successful. Knowing what customers want, makes you better able to serve them.  Perform test searches. You want to make sure visitors find what they want– and you provide. For obvious reasons, note searches for items you don’t sell.

2. Find Customer Exit Points

Outside of your sales confirmation page, you want to know where customers most often leave your site. If they leave at your product pages, it might be time for a redesign. If they leave during the checkout process, look at ways to simplify your checkout process.

3. Test Site Performance

Online shoppers don’t like to wait. If they did, they would shop at a physical store. Test how well your site functions at peak times.  Test user flows to analyze your purchasing paths.  Be particularly aware of any errors that occur. Test during low traffic periods as well. If performance problems still exist, this might be an indicator of a software or hardware problem. Compare your site metrics with these indice from ECommerce Times, to see how your site measures up to competitors.

4. Monitor Usability

Usability may be a reason for some of the exit points you found in tip #2.  Navigation should be a key area of focus, especially for sites with large offerings. If users get lost, or can’t find what they’re looking for, statistics tell us they’ll find another retailer. 

You also want to test your usability in various browsers and browser versions. With the introduction of Chrome, there’s a new landscape to traverse in terms of compatibility.

5. Optimize Product Pages

Test various layouts of your product pages.  Try different copy to determine what drives sales best. If you’re serious about increasing revenue, implement a multivariate testing strategy.

6. Find Customer Tendencies

Again, we’re back looking at customer focus. How customers navigate your site says a great deal about their needs. For example, if visitors tend to visit certain products in groups, you’ve got a hint on what to include in your cross-sells items list.

7. Make Your Most Popular Products Easy To Find

Sounds like common sense– and it is. Yet, many shopping sites don’t do this simple thing. If you sell shoes, make sure each subcategory page displays at least your top seller on that page. If you can display your top three, you’re in even better position to sell.

8. Simplify Checkout

As internet retailers, we have to accept cart abandonment. The idea will be to reduce it. Make sure your checkout process doesn’t confuse visitors. Add a step-by-step navigation bar at the top of the cart, indicating what steps still need to be completed. Consolidate steps where possible. Make sure you provide simple easy to understand instructions to facilitate checkout.  Don’t forget to make the ‘help’ or ‘faq’ button highly visible.

9. Address Shipping Charges Sooner Not Later

No one likes surprises on their bill. Provide shoppers with some expectations about shipping costs prior to checkout. 

10. Review Your Customer Service Plan

Recent surveys indicate that customer satisfaction with online shopping has dropped. The causes of this increased dissatisfaction have yet to be thoroughly identified. Be assured customer service will be some where on the list. Asses how well you handle customer inquiries and returns

Test and Retest      

Develop a conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. Testing various page layouts, copy and combinations of both, can greatly enhance you sales success. CRO should be just as important as SEO to your internet sales plan.               

Jeff Prus, senior director of user experience at VistaPrint recently stated at the Internet Retailer Conference 09, “VistaPrint regards ongoing site optimization as a revenue-generating function, one that generates millions of dollars per year in proven business value,” . CRO maximizes your SEO benefits. In these economic times every dollar counts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 Tips for Better Forms and Qualified Leads

Finding good leads make or break a salesman. The better the lead, the easier the sale.  This concept has a name— qualified leads.

Generating leads via the web presents its own set of challenges. The online form works day and night, gathering information about potential customers. The form constrains us, due to its finite nature, limiting us to a fixed set of questions. In the end, we act on faith more than assurance that leads will be of any substance. 

Creating good forms, forms that create qualified leads, requires a trial and error effort.  Here are ten ways to increase qualified lead generation via online forms:

1. Ask For the Right Information.

The basics:

• Name
• Email Address
• Company Name
• Visitors Title (helps to establish buying decision power)
• Phone Number (distinguish between work and cell)
• Reason for the Request/Type of Request (just looking or ready to buy)
• Market Identifiers (ask questions that will define segment of market)
• Influencers (who else will be involved in the decision)
• Anything specific to your industry or product

Obviously the Name and email should be required.  Don’t be afraid to require a phone number, especially for services. Required phone numbers will fend off the casual visitor. In addition, get the phone number type, work or cell. A work number indicates a more qualified lead.

2. Use Dropdowns

• Use drop down menus to isolate prime targets in your market
• Drop downs allow for more flexibility, while keeping control of the provided information
• Drop downs are easier to answer, allowing you to squeeze in two or three more questions
• Two or three well thought out drop downs are worth one big additional notes text field

3. Generate Specific Forms for Specific Conversion Paths

• Users in different roles have different needs, cater to the roles in your forms
• Use specific forms for specific products or services

4. Give Up Something to Get Something

• Requiring a form for a whitepaper has a less salesy feel
• Require a form to get pricing
• Utilize form completion for user group membership
• Add a private users section to your blog, requiring registration

5. Make Forms Convenient

• Make sure form questions are easy to read and understand
• Put forms in the margins of high traffic pages
• Make text in links to forms real marketing copy, not ‘get more info’

6. Make Specific Forms for Requesting a Phone Call

• Create a form specifically for people wanting a sales call

7. Strong Validation

• Make sure you validate important form fields (name, email, phone, etc)

8. Keep the Number of Fields to a Minimum

• Too many fields can run off potentially good leads

9. Always Follow Up Form Submissions

• Unreturned requests can harm your company’s reputation

10. Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

Optimizing form conversion rate via testing, should be you top priority.  In order to find the best form, you will need to test.  A form completion is a funnel goal. Its a link the visitor clicks that has potential value for your business. You’ll need to test various combinations to get the form that produces the most submitals, as well as the best qualified leads. Multivariate testing provides the best way to optimizing success. If you don’t test, you will waste valuable time and resources, while losing business to your testing competitors.

5 Tips to Convert Visitors to Customers

Does your website work? Yeah sure— it loads, the links work and and you don’t get any ‘page not found errors’.  That only means your website functions properly. But, does it really work? Does it sell or drive business well? 

How well does your site convert visitors from search to homepage to customer?

Most small to medium business owners would answer no. The others that answer yes, could most likely see a greater return based on the statistics. The average website only converts about 2% of its visitors into viable leads or customers.

With all the promises of the internet, most of us expected more from a web presence. So how do we do better?

1. Know Your Market

Make sure you identify your market. Your technical SEO efforts mean nothing, if you focus on the wrong keywords. Your customers have unfulfilled needs, that’s why they’re customers. Ensure that your keywords match your customer’s needs.

2. Match Content to Your Market

SEO gets your site ranked at the top of the heap. Now the user visits. Whether the user ‘bounces’ or stays depends on your content. Make sure your content addresses the needs of customers.

3. Build Funnels

I often see keyword ads that direct users to landing pages, that immediately propose the offer. In some cases this works, but most consumers have questions. That’s where funneling plays an important role. Offer multiple choices on your landing pages. The all or none approach leaves you very little room to persuade.

4. Write Good Copy

What you say plays an important role in conversion.  How you say it plays just as an important role. Your users will find certain words more compelling than others. Professional marketing copy helps to convert visitors.

5. Test Your Content

The most important tip of all. Utilize your website metrics to better understand what content works and doesnt’ work. Its rare you that you will build the perfect funnel or write the perfect web copy the first time. You need to vary copy, funnels and page layouts to find the most compelling combination.

Experts call this multivariate testing, or Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). If you haven’t heard of it, you will.  CRO will be what separates the most successful web marketing strategies, from the also rans. Here’s a great article on CRO if you want more information.

Build a Web Presence, Not a Website

I spoke with a friend looking to put her business on the web. She stated that she only wanted two or three pages.  I asked, “What do you want from your website?”.  The response was a moment of silence– followed by a not so clear response.

This happens to many small business owners looking to build their first website. Often, the push to get on the web, overshadows the more important need for effective planning.

The Internet: Just Another Business Tool

Websites are business tools.  With all the buzz concerning the web, there exists a false expectation of the internet’s return on investement and websites. Entrepreneurs are better served viewing their website as a very useful and flexible business tool— one that can benefit the business in numerous ways.

A business owner should treat a website in the same manner as their phone, their computer or their word processing software.  Each has a purpose, you thought about your desired benefits before investing.  You could clearly elucidate the reasons you need a phone— to contact customers quickly, to be accessible to customers, to conduct business remotely. 

Make Your Website Work

You should take the same approach to your website.  Think about specific objectives of owning a website, just as you would when choosing a physical location for your business. The new office location would need to posses enough offices, electrical outlets, network wiring and room to expand as you grow. In fact don’t call it a website, but a web presence. Using the term forces you to think dynamically– your presence means you’re participating in the internet medium.

Taking this approach inherently means you’re investing in the long term benefits of the internet. You can start with one or two pages, but you also have built the foundation as your needs expand. Putting together an initial web presence can be difficult, simply because the internet allows you to do so much. You can minimize the pain of building a web presence by following “The 6 P’s”— Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Useful Site Building Tips

I’ve provided some tips that others have used to help develop an initial web presence.  Obviously this doesn’t represent the end-all list, but hopefully it provides a good foundation upon which to build:

Define a Successful Site Visit

• From your businesses’ perpective, define what a successful visit means to you.
• Service based companies may desire qualified leads, maybe a request for quote.
• Product based companies may be seeking a sale. For big ticket items you might want an appointment request.

Your Site is a Funnel

• Site visitors start at the home page, decide what end point in their visit benefits you the most.
• Prioritize information from the most essential to buying details. Make sure your essential information makes the first version of your site.
• Identify the most important buying objections and questions. You can start to answer these in your secondary site pages.

Identify Your Visitor

• Define the demographics of your target visitor. It plays an important part in how you design your site.
• Estimate the knowledge level of the visitor concerning your product or service.  That helps determine what types of content you need to include in your site.
• Understand how visitors in different roles benefit from your product or service.

Hire a Web Site Designer, Not a Graphic Artist

• Find a designer that understands more than just web graphics.
• A Flash developer is different from a web designer.  Flash developers can build web sites, but there exist some drawbacks to this. *see my post regarding search engine web crawlers
• Make sure your site designer is committed to building your web presence over the long term.

Think Long Term

• Determine how often  you believe the site will need to be updated.
• Develop a schedule for writing new site content. This will help when talking about maintenance agreements with your site designer.
• Plan a schedule for site features you don’t need now, but expect to incude as time goes on.

Additional Resources

Website Magazine
Very comprehensive advice from a business perpective on web design.

Web Design Library
Lots of general advice, with a lean to the more technical side.

Web Design From Scratch
Very plain advice, focused on results oriented web design. 

Internet Retailer
Practical advice for ecommerce based web design.

CSS Web Design, A Top to Bottom Approach

Take it from the top.  A familiar phrase used to mean start from the beginning.  In terms of CSS web design and SEO, you want to start your web pages with the most important content at the top of your web page.  We’re not talking about the visual page, but the coded HTML behind the scenes.

Though you may not have put much thought into it, you would probably assume the search engine parser crawls the page from the top down.  We generally ignore how that fact impacts our SEO strategy from the web page coding level. 

With proper CSS design, the style sheet dictates layer positioning on the visual browser page.  That allows the designer to put keyword rich content at the top of the HTML code to be crawled first, without regards to the visual layout in the web browser.  It also allows for the placement of important links where the web crawler will be sure to find them.

Keyword Primacy and SEO

Don’t discount keyword positioning when implementing your SEO web design.  The paradigms of SEO require us to provide descriptive page titles and meta tags.  Take note of where those elelments exist in your page’s HTML code— at the very top.  Web crawlers take into account primacy when indexing your page.

The concept of primacy relies on the logic that the most important information will be presented first on any particular web page— like the title and keywords.  Once the crawler moves past the meta tags to your content, it assumes the subject focus for your page should soon follow.  If it doesn’t, your page indexing and ranking will suffer. 

The logic of primacy falls in line with search engines’ goals to provide reliable search results.  We’ve all seen the old internet bait and switch, particularly in emails.  So making sure that page content is relevant to the page title, and vice versa, plays a role in the indexing alogrithm of most search engines.

Top Down CSS Design Tips

1. Keyword Rich Content First
Layers containing keyword rich content should be the first layer after the ‘body’ tag.

2. Menus and Important Links Come Next
Put your main menu, and any other important links after the keyword rich content.  This assumes you have parsable links.  If you utilize Flash for your menus, this doesn’t matter— we’ll get to Flash in a moment. Parsers find text the easiest to crawl, so putting important links immediately following the most parsable content, increases the crawlers ability to index all of your site’s content.

3. Place Alt Texted Graphics After Links
The important thing to remember is alt texted graphics.  If you have aesthetic graphics that don’t have alt text—  either get rid of them, or find an appropriate alt text entry.  This doesn’t include Flash content.

4. Flash Files Go Last
Put your Flash based content at the very bottom.  The crawler can’t do anything with it anyway, so put it at the very end so it doesn’t get in the way of good content

The SEO Big Picture

In the grand scheme of SEO, our CSS design won’t put us at the top of the ‘charts’ so to speak.  Yet bad design can hinder any good SEO effort.  If you’ve invested in professional SEO consulting, you want to ensure maximum value for your investment.  So look at CSS web design as that leaky faucet that slowly drips, and over time wastes resources you would rather use in more important ways.

Parsing SEO From the Ground Up – The Finale

We’ve talked about the parser, and how it deals with various web technologies, so lets address how you can verify what’s being parsed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google makes content parsing verification easy with a set of tools— the Google Webmaster Tools.  If you haven’t utilized this tool set, then you’re not serious about SEO or SEM.  The Google Webmaster Tools gives you direct insight into what the googlebot— the name for Google’s parser, sees when it crawls your site.

Getting Started

The tool set doesn’t require any downloads or installation, its all web based, making it really easy to use. Like all Google online tools, it will require an account.  If you already have an AdWords or Analytics account, you are ready to go.   If not, registration only takes a minute.  You will need access to your web server.  In order to activate your account, Google requires you to verify your site ownership by uploading a file to your server.  Don’t worry, its a simple html file with a specific name, that you create.  No security issues to worry about, and you can delete the file once the account is verified.

The Google Webmaster Tools provides a great way to know how your website is being parsed.

Important SEO Metrics

Inside the tool set you’ll find a vast array of metrics.  We’ll look at few of the most important.

What Googlebot sees
This section provides the top 100 phrases and keywords in your site content– as the Google parser views your page.  If you’ve paid for professional SEO work, here’s where you can ensure you’re getting your money’s worth.

Top search queries
Another critical SEO/SEM tool.  What Google search queries provide you the most traffic?  You might be surprised.  Again, here you can verify that your SEM strategy is on the right track.  You can also discover other areas of potential SEM success.

Index Stats
Find out what pages Google already has indexed.  Important information, especially if you see pages missing. Also provides a list of pages that link to your sites homepage.  This is the most important stat in terms of Google organic SEO.

Diagnostics
Another important tool set.  Lets you know if Google had any problems crawling your site.  We discussed potential technology related crawling errors the last post— this particular tool provides a way to ensure those pages, and all the other pages of your site are crawled properly.

Only the Beginning of Your SEO Journey

Hopefully our walk through web crawling technology has demystified CSS web design. SEO and SEM are always a work in progress, but your web design will provide a solid foundation upon which to build.  You should also note that SEO and SEM efforts will be greatly improved with the proper use of web analytics.  Even if the parser sees the correct keywords and phrases, you must still consider the human factor.  You’ll definitely want to implement multivariate testing as a part of your analytics approach.

One final note.  It’s important to realize that the Google Webmaster Tools only gives you the Google perspective.  The MSN or yahoo search engines may view your site somewhat differently.  Yet, good results with the Google tools, generally means a good chance of success with other search engines as well.  At this time, I don’t know of any similar tools for the other major search engines.  If anyone out there knows of any, drop us a line so we can spread the word.

Parsing SEO From the Ground Up – Part 2

SEO and Dynamic Content

In our last post we talked about SEO and its relationship to web design.  In particular, we looked at how web crawlers parse pages.  The parser’s functionality provides a guideline as to how your web designer should approach constructing your website.  In this post, let’s focus on some specific web technologies like AJAX, Dynamic Pages and FLASH, to determine how they may effect your website’s parsibility.

Dynamic Pages

The modern website relies heavily on up-to-date and accurate data.  The solution has become dynamic pages such as ASP, JSP and PHP.  These technologies allow for the retrieval of data, that’s not only accurate, but specific to the needs of each site viewer.  They’ve also become the foundation of many content management systems, which rely on storing content  in databases (we’re going to talk about CMS in another post).  Dynamic page data doesn’t become content until the browser requests the page.  The underlying code retrieves the data, and then integrates the content with the existing html– that’s the good news.  Parsers crawl dynamic data, just like any other data.   That fact does imply that your designer must ensure the integrated html utilizes parser friendly coding– using such things as ‘div’ tags rather than ‘table’ tags to arrange data.  You must also be aware of how your links are created. 

AJAX and SEO

So dynamic data parses fine, as long as we follow good CSS design rules.   As part of your CSS design audit, you will want to review page links.  If your links call functions, not urls, you’ll be back in the parser dead zone.  Parsers can’t run script, they look for urls.  So if your links are script driven, the likelihood exists some content won’t get parsed. To figure out if your links are script driven, open your browser to any page.  Mouseover the different links.  At the bottom left hand corner of your browser window, you’ll see the link destination.  If this destination doesn’t contain a url, but something that looks like computer code, bet on the parser skipping that link. 

Look for URLs when mousing over links in your browser.

The Web 2.0 trend has fueled a rise in scripted links.  That’s because more and more websites utilize AJAX.  AJAX is a great technology.  In short, it lets the browser retrieve data from the server without reloading the web page.  The down side of AJAX in relation to SEO– AJAX links generally require scripted links.  The answer is to utilize scripted links only when necessary, or provide an alternative linking system if possible.  If you use AJAX to generate pricing pages for your business’s different offerings, you’re probably fine.  If you utilize AJAX to generate marketing pages containing large amounts of text, you may be better served just creating new pages.

FLASH: The Buck– That Is Parser Stops Here

FLASH provides dynamic content better than any other web technology.  For that reason, it will always have a place at the web design table.  But just like anything else, too much of a good thing can be bad.  FLASH resides on your web page as  a separately compiled program. In simple terms, the parser treats FLASH content like an image– it realizes it’s there, but any text contained in the image isn’t parsed.  You mean I can’t use FLASH? Yes you can, but utilize it strategically.  Avoid FLASH based menus, or presenting core content important to SEO in flash components.  Unfortunately the parser has no way of reading the content.  If you rely on a FLASH driven main menu, the parser can’t follow the links– those are pages that don’t get ranked in the search engine.

There may be reasons you want to keep your FLASH based content.  No problem, just make sure you provide some traditional linking system to access the data in a non-FLASH format.  This is a good idea anyway, as you’ll also make your site more 508.b compliant.

The Great Technology Divide

Web 2.0 and dynamic page technologies are here to stay.  There’s no reason to not utilize these tools to enhance your website.  Just keep in mind when and where to use them.  Understand how they effect search engine parsing, and keep an open dialogue with your web designer concerning parsibility.

In tomorrow’s post we’ll talk about ways to validate that your content is being parsed.