Kate has decided to take the plunge and start her own ‘Hypnotherapy Clinic ‘in the fabulous location of Rainford close to both St Helens and Wigan. Kate will be offering a range of therapies including Adult and Child Hypnosis, Past Life Therapy and Parapsychology. These therapies are designed to help everything from increasing self esteem and confidence through to resolving unwanted habits, fears and phobias.

Essio would like to offer Kate the very best of fortune and success in her new venture and thank Kate once again for choosing Essio Marketing for her Web Design and Online Marketing requirements.

Getting your website seen is undoubtedly the most crucial part of having a business website online. If you intend on doing a lot of hard marketing and intend to gain traffic in the short and long term solely by these methods and links from other websites, then you can just concentrate on getting your website looking and functioning the way that you desire.

However, if you are someone that wants to make the most of the online traffic that is available, then there are a few boxes that need to be ticked. Most importantly, can your website be found and read by the search engines? Many websites have features in place that can reduce your website’s visibility or, in some cases, eliminate its visibility altogether.

The first thing to consider is what words or phrases should bring searchers to your website; these words are your ‘keywords’. Carry out thorough keyword research before making any changes to your website the following article will help you to choose keywords with commercial value to your business; Target Keywords with Commercial Value. Once you are happy with the chosen keywords ensure that they appear in important sections of your website such as;

Meta Tags
Whilst viewing your website, click view from the browser menu then view ‘Page Source’, you should find Meta Tags located between the HEADER tags (). These are the primary points for search engines to read and establish a page’s readability and contents value to its users.

Robots
The ‘robots’ Meta Tags can instruct the search engines whether or not to read the content. If this Tag does not exist within the website code, then the default ‘index and follow’ applies. If this Tag is present with content such as “no index” or “no follow”, then this particular page will restrict search engines ability to view and index your content.

Title
This is not an actual Meta Tag, but is closely associated and so is treated like one by many designers and internet marketers. The title, located between the TITLE Tags (), will appear within the tab of the webpage when opened. The title is easily edited, but some companies choose to just fill these with words such as “home page” or “about us”, which is not very descriptive to the search engines, and can increase the difficulty in getting your website promoted through the search results. A better option is to use words or phrases relating to your website i.e. keywords that you wish to be found for on search engines. Ensure that the keywords are both relevant to your content and that they also appear in your content; this will help you to rank higher for relative keywords on search engines.

Description
The description tag (“description”) works on two fronts. Firstly it is used for the search engines to better understand the content of a page; secondly it is used as the paragraph which will be displayed in the search results. A lot of thought needs to be put into this section, firstly, to ensure that is it descriptive as well as inviting to visitors to increase the clicks through to your website.

Flash versus XHTML

Flash can not exist on a website without HTML or XHTML, so there is not an actual Flash-only choice. However with websites primarily using flash for a website, the content can be unreadable and so will not do well when trying to rank in the search engines. There are tools available that allow you to see what the search engines see, a good and free tool to use is Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer which can be downloaded at Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer.

It is recommended to have an XHTML site that has small sections of flash content embedded. This allows you to benefit from the visual appeal of flash but benefit from optimised content from the XHTML to increase the traffic to your website.

Within an XHTML website, there any many factors that attribute a readable site, such as limited or no use of tables and inline frames (iframes). This does get technical and can become very complicated. In its simplicity the less code-to-content ratio, the better; but it is advisable to contact a professional SEO Company/designer to establish the quality of the website code.

A sigh of relief is going over flash web designers and developers as Adobe team up with Google and Yahoo to help Flash sites get found by their search engines. The idea behind this is to enhance the readability of Flash sites by major search engines, resulting in potentially higher ranking by Google and Yahoo. By implementing algorithms and updating existing ones, crawlers will be able to effectively search through your Flash site and generate an accurate illustration of the theme and content of your site. As yet there is no published complete date, but Google has already started amalgamation between its services and Adobe Flash Player technology.

Naturally, one of the many supporters of this integration is David Wadhwani, General Manager and Vice President of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, who believes that the initiative will “significantly improve search of this rich content on the web”. Some have even go so far as to call the innovation the “Holy Grail”, as posted by fellow supporter Richard MacManus on Read Write Web.

Is it all good news?

Debates have begun concerning the possible limitations put on smaller search engines as a result of the two major search engines joining forces. Claims have arisen that the smaller search engines, such as Ask, Msn, etc, will be pushed further out of the market, creating an oligopoly consisting of Yahoo and Google.

However, having analysed debates made for and against this move, it would appear that the majority of arguments on both sides are made based on individual opinion and comfort with the use of flash software. Basically, it appears to depend on whether you like Flash.

Amending existing websites

This new development has caused some concerns regarding existing websites, as the unknowledgeable believe that amendments are required to allow their websites to be seen by crawlers. However, it is said that there is no requirement to amend existing web sites to allow crawlers to view your site, but I think its safe to say that a lot of Flash web sites have poor optimisation, especially within dynamic content. If you are a true SEO designer, it is worth reviewing and updating your Flash sites just so that you can maximise the benefits of these algorithms for your site.

Article original published: 6th October 2008