MasterLink Internet Marketing

Recently Adobe, the software provider of Flash, announced it is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! The new development is said to improve search results for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the Flash file format.

Adobe explained on their website:

"This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won't need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe."

That all sounds great, but I wouldn't go and redesign your CSS and HTML developed site for an all Flash experience just yet.

There are still many issues to consider that can prevent the search engines from treating your Flash content as regular HTML text. Back when Al Gore created the internet ;-) it started as primarily text based pages. The search engine algorithms were built around analyzing that text. And that has not changed.

Search engines may now be able to access the text within a Flash file but they cannot quite process it as they do HTML text. They still look in the HTML for important meta data used to structure the HTML. This information can include the title tag, the formatting code as in H1, bolded text and lists as well as image alt tags.

In addition to the limits of processing text in Flash, the search engines will have problems with the lack of unique URLs found in Flash sites. Many times a Flash site is all contained within the homepage URL. As you navigate through the site the URL never changes. This means all of the text processed by the search engines will have to be indexed as one single page. It also means that they may not process all of the text in the site as they will not execute all of the actions within the Flash.

The indexing of Flash text may also cause less than ideal user experiences. As the search engines find text within the Flash site not contained in the first level a visitor may discover the site in the search results only to find once they click through that the text they're searching for is not there. Rather than trying to navigate though the site to find what they're looking for they'll likely click the back button to find a page that has that info right away.

Now I'm not saying all Flash is bad. We create Flash animations on many of our web site designs. And since we are also search engine optimization company our designers typically limit the Flash portion to a small animated banner at the top of a page that has images and text. The text not being that important for search engines as we make sure the sites and pages all have plenty of unique indexable HTML text content to feed to the search engines. This type of Flash use has never been a big concern for us and still isn't. The concerns would be for those sites whose entire development was done in Flash. I'm not betting on those sites magically ranking for competitive terms suddenly.

As more companies are increasingly using organic search marketing to promote their products and services, it can be more difficult to achieve the higher rankings for generic terms that everyone else in your industry is pursuing. While essentially any search engine ranking is achievable given the right amount of time, money and resources, you need to decide whether the additional effort involved is worth it, considering you can get overall better results from a campaign by making sure that a high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

A good way to accomplish this is by including keyword modifiers, or additional descriptive words, in the keyphrases that you target on your site. This helps to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is highly targeted, meaning they are looking for exactly what you are offering and are therefore much more likely to convert by making a purchase or filling out a form. By including descriptive words you are targeting what is called the “long tail” of search.

To illustrate this, suppose your web site sells cars, but specifically specializes in selling used cars to people in the Dallas Metroplex area who possibly have bad credit. Since we are selling cars we could definitely say that we want the site to rank for the most general keyword “cars”. But in doing so, we could be spending time on generating traffic that is not even interested in your site. For instance some visitors may have been looking to “rent luxury cars” or for a company that performs “repairs on import cars”. These visitors will go back to the search results to find what they were looking for. The time, money and effort spent on ranking your site for the keyword “cars” was not the wisest choice. The better strategy would have been to optimize for keyphrases like “buy used cars dallas” and “dallas bad credit car loans”, etc.


Finding keywords that are shown to have 5,000, or even 500 searches a day can feel like discovering gold. However, these "popular" search terms only account for less than 30% of total internet searches. The other 70% of searches are the "long tail" which consists of millions of unique searches that may only be searched for a few times in a day, but, when totaled, they make up the majority of the world's searches in the search engines.

To make it even more interesting, 25% of Google’s total user queries are unique, meaning they have never been searched for before. Long tail searches are becoming more and more common; a recent report now shows that the average Google query consists of 4 words and not 3. That’s up for the first time ever as of Q4 2007, from the long-time 3 word per query Google user average.

So as searchers become more sophisticated in their search engine use by adding more words to their queries to find the most relative content, it enables us to target these long tail keyphrases to drive a higher percentage of targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic = qualified customers = more conversions.