SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

Google announced about its capability to index Flash in July 2008, however the indexing capabilities had some severe limitations. In a recent announcement in Google Webmaster Blog they have now clarified about their enhanced capabilities to crawl and index flash files.

While they have improved on a bunch of issues I think the most important point is that now Googlebot is able to index a flash file and also index the content in it even if it is loaded from an external source like an XML, .txt file or another .swf. Also it can map the flash file to the content and evaluate the flash page in its entirety. Prior to these Google would typically evaluate the flash file sans the content whenever content is being loaded from any external source.

The points below summarizes all the points that illustrates Googlebot's capability with flash indexing..

• Googlebot can now index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. It can click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.


• Discover links within Flash files.


• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.


• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.


• Index sites scripted with AS1,AS2 and AS3 even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

With this super charged Googlebot it seems that it is no more an impossible task to have a full flash website and yet hit the first page of Google SERP. However, this is a very recent announcement and it would definitely be better to play it safe with good old HTML if you have some serious SEO in mind.

Related Post:
Google Starts Indexing Flash

Labels: crawling, Flash, Google, indexing, SEO

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Recently Matt Cutts from Google made a statement in which he clearly stated that PageRank scuplting using No-follow tags will not be possible anymore and this created a strong hullabaloo in the SEO world. Let's take a look at what Matt said and how exactly does it affect the World Wide Web, SEO or otherwise.

What Matt Said about PageRank Sculpting and No-Follow

Earlier No-follow could be used to sculpt PageRank by restricting the flow of PageRank to the no-followed links and the additional PR juice available would flow into the remaining links. However, now no-follow would still prevent PR from moving onto the no-followed pages but would not add additional PR juice to the remaining links, it would evaporate. To illustrate it further look at the highly simplified equations below:

Earlier
PR10 -> 5 Links -> 3 links No-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 5 each

Now
PR10 -> 5 links -> 3 links no-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 2 each
-> Balance 6 for the other 3 links Evaporates

A Concern in the Blogosphere – Losss of PageRank

Sites with too many links (particularly blogs with loads of comments and links in them) might lose PageRank or will have very little PageRank

No Real Concern for Losing PageRank

What Matt said didn’t talk about how a page might lose Page Rank it talked about how the PR is distributed among outgoing links. It has been long stated that PR doesn’t leak. It is just a vote for other sites – when you link to a site you give them some PR power but you don’t lose any of your PR. So if you have thousands of links on your page that would actually reduce your potential to pass PR to other pages but would not affect your own Page Rank.

You can see the original PR formula here . Though I am sure this must have gone through multiple iterations but it would help to understand the basics and confirm the fact that there is no risk of losing your Page Rank by linking to other pages.

So, No-follow doesn’t help PR Sculpting – How does it effects the Web ?

• It becomes more difficult to increase your PageRank now as most pages would get a substantial reduction in their potential to pass PageRank to other pages


• Overall reduction in the tendency to link to other websites as most sites would like to retain their potential to pass PR to fuel their own pages ( through internal navigation). This could actually mean detrimental to the basic principle of WWW.


• Blogosphere gets affected as a substantial part of it involves user generated content and links play a major role in this. So less number of links = less citations, lesser resources


• Old school methods ( pre no-follow era) for PR sculpting like putting links in iframes, Flash, JavaScript links etc would come into play. Google is now rendering basic JavaScript as well, so that might not be a full proof method. Putting not so important links or user generated content area in AJAX would probably add to the list.


• In all likeliness, niche websites would have relatively higher competition - There are authority websites on every industry but in spite of there existence there are various niche websites that survive and do good. This happens not because the authority websites do not have content on those niche segments but because they would often focus more on broader terms that drive more traffic and profit and care less about the niche segments and at times even link to these smaller sites when covering those niche areas. This helps them to retain their focus on the broader terms and maximize profit rather than diluting there effort over a wide variety of keywords. These links to the smaller sites are always no-followed. Now when the sites realize that using a no-follow would not preserve the PR for its own pages and it actually evaporates, they would stop linking to external niche sites and build their own pages on those niches. Because of the website authority, in most cases these niche pages on authority websites would start beating the niche websites in SERP.
  
  

I am sure there will be other impacts of this as well; it’s for us to wait and find out. If you can think of any other possible effects of this new Google policy of disabling PageRank Sculpting with no-follow tag please feel free to add in comments.

Labels: Google, matt Cutts, Nofollow, PageRank, Sculpting

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Getting back links through Press Release distribution is probably nothing new to most of us who have dabbled in the space of online marketing, however, press releases can do lot more than getting a few back links.

While links are probably one of the best value addition that a website can get through online press release distribution here are few other ways in which a Press release can help.

• Rankings in SERP : A properly optimized press release can actually rank in Google and other search engines for related keywords, reaching a good number of your target audience and resulting in tons of referral traffic that actually converts
  


• Reputation Management: Businesses are becoming increasingly conscious about their online reputation management particularly in search results. If a search for your brand names show any unfavorable result a few well optimized press releases can do wonders in pushing them off the Google first page


• Additional Credibility for Brand and Product: Many customers would do some online research about the company and product before making purchase. Information about your product holds more credibility when they are passed through press release than through traditional advertisement.


• Additional Reach: Your press release, if well optimized and properly distributed can easily end up on popular news sources like Google News, Yahoo News, Topix etc and draw substantial traffic from such websites if you really have something newsworthy to communicate.

It is true that we can have all these advantages from press releases but for this to happen it is also important that we know how to optimize our press release. The way a PR is distributed also plays a key role in the process. For more on this check out How to Optimize Press Release for Search Engines .

Labels: optimization, press release, Reputation Management

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Facebook finally launched a feature that was long overdue from a popular social networking site of its stature. After a dramatic 3 day countdown yesterday midnight they have launched the vanity URLs for its users. Now instead of a random number at the end of your Facebook profile URL you can actually have your name( if you are lucky) or some meaningful word of your choice.

I think I am a bit late on this post ( am a real lazy a** these days) because the rush is full on and if you have not secured your personalized Facebook URL, log on to your Facebook account right away and you will see a notification of the vanity URL on top of your profile page. Just follow the instructions and you should be done in a jiffy.

My relatively long Indian name helped me get some competitive advantage as I guess there are not many Facebookers by my name and now I am at http://www.facebook.com/saptarshi.roy.chaudhury . if you have not yet grabbed your

However, as per Facebook blog for recent Facebook users who have signed up for an account after May 31st this feature would not be available for now. This has been set up to prevent name squatting on Facebook and I think its a very wise decision that the Facebook guys have taken.

If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Now with this personalized Facebook URL, it would probably be a better tool to use for online search reputation management, and would probably be much more effective if Facebook allows for a little more information on profile pages for users without log ins ( Google bot don't have a Facebook ID ;) )

Related Posts:
Facebook Song with Lyrics
Facebook Sacrifices Burger King Application

Labels: Facebook, Reputation Management, Social Media

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I have always advocated the use of Notepad for people willing to learn HTML properly and recently one of my cousins who have just started learning HTML and is diligently sticking to the notepads, avoiding the lure of easy WYSIWYG editors came back to me with a problem."How can I find the proper HTML color code when coding in notepad"

Instead of giving him a short answer I thought I would make a post here on HTML color codes so that it can be of help to so many other people who are also stuck with issues and doubts about these strange looking hexadecimal color codes.

Though I mentioned them as "strange looking hexadecimal codes" they are not really strange and are rather pretty logically formed. In HTML, at times we use names of colors like, red, blue, green etc but more often than not we use Hexadecimal color codes to add more precise colors on the web pages.Let's look at what is the logic behind Hexadecimal HTML color codes..

HTML color codes are formed basically of three primary colors - Red , Green and Blue, otherwise referred to as RGB. In all the hexa decimal color codes you will typically see six characters, for example #ff6633 - in this case the first two character defines value for red, the next two for Green and the last two for blue. If you would go through a HTML color code chart you will notice that lower numbers and letters display darker colors ( Black: #000000 ). So if we would like to have a bright red color we would have the code as #FF0000 - which would mean to the browser maximum Red ( FF) No Blue (00), No green (00). If you can keep a few basic color codes in mind you can probably do some permutation and combination based on the above mentioned facts to get other color variations. It is important that we append the # before the color code.

How to get the exact HTML color codes

a) When you are creating a webpage from a design, open it in Photoshop and use the color picker tool to click on the color of your choice, it will show you the HTML color code for that. A color picker tool is available on all graphic design applications and this is the easiest way to do this.

b) HTML color code charts - Yes, readymade HTML color code charts are available on the web. A small Google search and you can find a lot of them. Some of them list almost all possible colors and variations along with their hexadecimal code for HTML. So a simple search and then a copy paste job can resolve the issue. Check this HTML color code chart for reference: http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/Color_Charts

Labels: color codes, hexadecimal, HTML

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Press releases can be a very handy tool in the process of promoting a web site. While a well distributed press release can bring a bunch of links for your website, if written well, press releases can also rank in search results by themselves resulting in loads of referral traffic.

Internet marketing professionals and SEOs have all realized the potential of press release in optimizing their website and are trying to leverage this to maximum benefit.In this article I will list a few tips that will tell you how to write a search engine optimized press release.

a)Similar to the basic principle of SEO content writing, do a short keyword research to identify which are the keywords you want to target. Find a keyword that people are actually searching for and is a proper match/ description for your product/ service/ company. Use any keyword tool like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to find this.

b)Ensure you use your chosen keyword phrase in the headline of your press release. If your press release is relatively long, create a sub heading using the keyword phrase.

c)Use this keyword phrase in the content of the press release wherever applicable but make sure that you aren't forcibly stuffing your keyword in the content. A keyword stuffed press release would never meet its proper distribution potential thereby failing the basic purpose of the exercise. If you are not the best person when it comes to writing skills it is strongly advisable to take help of professional writers.For a good press release it is extremely important to maintain balance between the natural content appeal and the keyword insertion for optimization.

d)Use your website URL in the body of the press release. Make sure that the URL is inserted in proper URL form ( http://www.yourdomain.com ) and not just yourdomain.com

e)While Press releases are official communication and demands the mention of brand names, unless your brand is already a household name try to use short descriptive phrase for your product or service than just using the brand name. This would increase the chance of your press release showing up on search results when people search for those product descriptions. For example, instead of referring to your SEO software by its name "SEOUltima", if you would mention it as "SEO Software" or "SEO Software SEOUltima" that would help in optimizing the Press Release for SEO Software keyword.

f)Another easy way to increase the frequency of such descriptive phrases or brand names in your press release is to use them instead of pronouns like "it".

g)This should probably have been the first point in this list. Make sure that your Press release is actually newsworthy. That is one of the key factor that determines how well it gets syndicated.

h)Depending on available budget and importance of the release use a paid PR distribution service. Alternatively, there are various PR services that will distribute your news for free.

If you are choosing a free PR distribution service, first check if the service is indexed by popular news search engines. Check the coverage in places like Google News, Yahoo News.

i)Besides submitting to PR networks, put up the press release on your own site in its separate page and link to it from the home page.

j)Submit your press release to popular social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl etc

k)Search Google News for your target keywords and make a note of the sites that are already listed. Check if those sites would accept and publish your Press Release.

l)If you are publishing frequent press releases ( that helps ! ) make sure you have a RSS feed for your press release.

Labels: Delhi seo meet, Google News, image optimization, PR distribution, press release

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