Zee Designs

The type of domain is an important indicator of the content of a site.

• .gov sites seem to be the highest status because they are verifiably “official.”
• .edu sites seem to be given a high status for the same reason.
• .org sites seem to be given a high status because they are noncommercial.
• .com, .biz, .info, or similar types of sites are often used by spammers, resulting in the need for higher scrutiny.

In addition, the technology and the programming used can affect search engine rankings. For example, sites programmed with frames or as flash-only sites are at a disadvantage.
 

Flash animation is a great way to present complex content because it allows the designer to put more content in a finite space without wrecking page design. Flash is an ideal way to present a slide show or movie explaining a complex product. Art and entertainment sites have a real need for multimedia, and Flash is the perfect solution.

As part of a total solution, Flash is great! As the basis for an entire website, it introduces challenges for Search Engine Optimization. While Flash sites are graphics-based, Search Engines are text-based. For years the two worlds had trouble intersecting.

In recent years, Flash has been billed as having added new features that make it more conducive to SEO, and Google has bragged about its ability to handle Flash files. Despite all this, trusting Flash content to get good SEO results is like trusting a Seattle summer wedding to be rain-free. It could happen, but no one would call it a wise bet. The interfaces between Flash and the search engines is still too new and there are issues to overcome.

• Low ranking based on links:
  • There's no way to link to individual elements on a page unless the Flash developer is specifically building for this scenario - and even then, there's almost always some portions that are missed.
  • Some Flash content is only linked-to by other Flash content wrapped inside shell Flash pages which means some very low Page Rank documents.
  • Flash Doesn't Earn External Links Like HTML. An all-Flash site might get a large number of links to the homepage, but interior pages almost always suffer. People can’t copy and paste a few quotes into their own pages and link to your site.
• Keywords and other SEO Basics Ranking Features Are Often Missing.
  • Google can index the files in the SWF to see words and phrases, but in Flash, most text isn't in nice clean format tags and may be rendered inaccurately.
  • Anchor text, headlines, bold/strong text, img alt tags, and even title tags are not simple elements to properly include in Flash, and 9 times out of 10, the designer won't build them in properly. Developing Flash with SEO in mind is not just more difficult than doing it in HTML, it's not part of the cultural lexicon of the Flash-development world.
• Those creepy-crawly spiders get lost
  • Google's Flash-crawling technology is proprietary, and while we all know and can test what search engines see from a content and link perspective in HTML, there's no "test my site's Flash file crawlability" feature so we don’t know how the engine's going to translate your material.
  • A Lot of Flash Isn't Even Crawlable. Google said they don't execute external javascript calls (which many Flash-based sites use) or index the content from external files called by Flash (which, again, a lot of Flash sites rely on). These limitations could severely impact what a visitor can see vs. what Googlebot can index.

(Note: Adapted from the SEOmoz Blog, where you can learn more about Search Engine Optimization.)

Hoping that search engines can decipher your Flash is not a substitute for providing index-able HTML content. There are things that can be done to make Flash sites more accessible to Search Engines and Zee Designs can help.
 

Your site can be made into a hybrid site that contains both Flash and HTML elements.

Any content you embed in these files can also be available in text format to be accessible to search engines. Providing text-based equivalents of these files can help other search engines crawl and index your content. In addition, a text-based version of your site will let viewers using older browsers or mobile phones access your content easily. However, now that Google can index Flash in greater depth, there is the potential problem of duplicate content with sites that have an alternate HTML version for users without Flash player installed, and duplications are frowned on.

There are other, more sophisticated programming methods that use javascript for embedding and retrieving the information in the Flash files.

Zee Designs can help you evaluate your Flash-based website to determine which approach would work best for you.
 

Many Content Management Systems use technologies that do not interface well with search engines. The ZD-CMSTM was created with SEO in mind.

Meaningful, linkable URLs

The ZD-CMS™ provides simple, meaningful URLs for all website pages. Not every CMS does this. For example, here's a URL from the Joomla CMS:

http://www.vegas-events.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

There's no indication what kind of content is on that page. You won't know until you visit it. After redoing the above site in the ZD-CMS™, the URL became:

http://upstatevegasevents.com/testimonials

Now you can tell immediately what's on that page (and so can the search engines). It's also easier to link to from an email or to tell someone over the phone. Search engines will rank it higher, also, because the URL is understandable and congruent with the content.

Clean HTML/CSS

Our sites are created using cutting-edge standards for code. Pages generated by our system are clean and as free as possible of clutter, which makes it easier for search engines (and accessibility software) to understand the meaning of the pages. Google is blind: it can't see cool designs; all it cares about is the semantic interpretation of your site - the meaning. Our sites are structured behind the scenes with this in mind.

Progressive Enhancement

Zee Designs uses JavaScript extensively on our sites to enhance the user experience and add a "wow" factor. At the same time, we realize that not everyone has JavaScript enabled: in particular, disabled persons and search engines. We reconcile our desire for fancy visuals with the needs of disabled users (including search engines) by using a technique called progressive enhancement.

Progressive enhancement means we start with a site that works for everyone, regardless of their abilities, technical or otherwise. Next, we use JavaScript to enhance the experience for those who have it. If you don't have JavaScript, that's fine, the site will work, and you'll be able to access everything. If you do have JavaScript (around 95% of users do), you'll get a little bit of extra smoothness and sparkle as a bonus.

Metadata

Each site and each page within a site can have metadata associated with it, such as keywords, description, author, and so on. This helps search engines get a feel for what kind of content a page contains. Search engines are always looking for meaning, and metadata helps communicate important chunks of information directly to them in a machine-readable format.