Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with search industry leaders, including Google and Yahoo, to make the contents of Flash files indexable.

Flash has historically been a roadblock to search engines as they have been unable to read the content within .swf files. Often, major pieces of content or even entire sites are built with flash, rendering the site nearly invisible to search engine spiders. The solution for this was to either create a non-flash, text based version of the site or present alternate content through Flash detection and JavaScript. These options added more development time and cost for site developers.

With today’s announcement that Flash will now be crawlable, this presents a potentially major breakthrough for the search engines. It opens up a wealth of previously ignored content across the web.

Google has detailed that they can crawl text within Flash files as well as links that appear within the Flash. However, images and text within images will still not be crawled. Yahoo has not yet announced any details of how or what it will be able to crawl within Flash files.

There are some important items to consider, both good and bad. First the good – nothing needs to be done for existing Flash that is already live on your website. Google can crawl your flash files automatically and nothing needs to be done on the part of webmasters. However, it should be noted that not all Flash files will be crawled due to some limitations of the search engines. Any .swf file that is loaded using JavaScript will not be crawled, as Google mostly ignores JavaScript. This is a potential issue as many sites use JavaScript to do flash detection and the subsequent embedding of the .swf file. Second, any Flash movie that pulls its data from an external file such as XML, html, or another SWF file will not be considered associated with the primary Flash movie on the page.

Due in part to the limitations outlined above, it appears that the real benefactor of today’s announcement will be sites that employ static content that is embedded using an out of the box method: using object tags. Hopefully in the very near future we will be able to see the depth and effectiveness of the search engines’ ability to crawl Flash, and the impact it has upon search results. We will be looking to see whether letting the search engines crawl your flash files is better than feeding the content to spiders by alternate means.

Article by Richard Deede

While blogs originally were used almost exclusively for personal purposes, there are countless businesses today that use blogs as a medium to enhance branding, increase marketing efforts, deliver news and press releases, and more.  Over 5% of Fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog and almost 70% of large companies blog regularly.

With such rampant competition, it’s crucial to ensure that a corporate blog is following SEO best practices.  Fortunately, one of the most important SEO factors – frequent content that is unique and fresh – is also the essence of a successful blog.  Posting new content several times weekly or more ensures more frequent indexing by the search engine spiders.
There is plenty more that a corporate blogger can do to ensure that their blog is optimized to its full potential. It’s easy and affordable to host a blog at a separate domain (on a site like Wordpress or Blogger), but that could result in the blog competing with your corporate site for traffic, rankings and inbound links. Ideally, a corporate blog should be hosted as a section of its corporate domain, so that the visits the blog receives are counted towards the entire corporate site.

Well-written blog headlines are crucial – they tell the readers and the search engine spiders what the article is about. They are usually used as a page title tag, and should be enticing to the user as well as keyword-rich.  Also important is the placement of keywords themselves.  Placing keywords in page headers, bulleted lists, and hyperlink anchor text will show the search engine spiders that those keywords have value.

In the past few years, social bookmarking has become a blogger’s best friend.  In addition to the SEO benefit of added incoming links, social bookmarking will increase traffic to the blog and can also expedite inclusion of a blog post in the search engines’ indexes.  To promote social bookmarking by readers, make the bookmarking functionality available on every post.

Another important aspect of SEO for corporate blogging is link popularity. Start by making sure that there are links to the blog from its corporate website.  Contact any partners or other businesses with which your company has a relationship to request links.  Ultimately, though, a blog will get the most links by publishing interesting, useful content that other bloggers will want to write about and link to. These bloggers will provide relevant inbound links and increased visits to the blog.

Article by Dana Forman

The overriding theme at the e-tailer conference in Chicago this month was Search  --  Local, Mobile and especially Social Media Optimization. Web 2.0 was being discussed not only in the sessions, but in every nook and cranny of McCormick Place as e-tailers of all sizes compared notes.
 
It's nothing new that retail marketers are trying to find that perfect mix of tactics that will drive the most quality customers to their sites. What was evident was that many brands are now diving head first into social media after seeing the positive impact of the toe they put in initially.  Creating two-way relationships with consumers is proving to be far less scary than many had feared, and brands like Dell and Graco Baby spoke enthusiastically about their successful social marketing campaigns.
 
Combining search with social media is where brand marketers are still finding their way. Utilizing blogs, PR and quality linking to increase organic search rankings is a surefire way to drive more traffic to your online store. The e-tailers who have merged the two tactics have been able to get a head start on what will surely be an even bigger part of the e-tailer conference discussions in ‘09.

Article by Cathy Burke

Microsoft has decided to stop kicking the tires on semantic search and see what all the buzz is about as they have agreed to buy Powerset.

If video killed the radio star, did the internet kill newspapers?

Hey Investors! Don't look at our falling stock price, we have another plan...Yahoo! continues to be Yahoo!