Marketing Strategy

With the plethora of websites online and hundreds added each day, how are you going to separate your website from the others? When I began my first online venture I was so excited to have my website up and running and I remember thinking “wow, the toughest part is behind me”, referring to finally getting the aesthetics and functionality of the website just how I wanted them. I thought that marketing the website would be the easy part. Boy was I wrong.

Flash based web sites and the search engines

As with many of my articles and newsletters, this one is inspired by a question put to me: “Is it true that you should not have a flash web site since search engines do not recognize flash? ”

The short answer to the question is yes and no. 🙂

Search engines traditionally cannot see flash – but since Flash 4, Macromedia (the guys who make Flash) built into Flash the capability to be ‘seen’ by the engines. Today search engines like AlltheWeb.com, Lycos and Google among others can index (see into) Flash movies, but only in a limited way. As far as I can tell, the engines can only extract links from the Flash movies and not much else. Compare this to an HTML page where the search engine robots (the automated programs that search engines use to surf and catalogue the web) can read everything about the page and thus your web site will have a much better chance of appearing in the search engines.

Yahoo’s Back!

I was all set to write an article predicting the future of search engines, when Yahoo dropped Google and replaced it with its own engine. Now that’s big news. In less than twenty-four hours, Google went from about 79% of the market share to about 51%, almost overnight. And what a welcome relief it is too! Being #1 in Google was great, but when you had the misfortune of dropping even a couple of positions you really felt it. Now there will be more stability; if you drop in Google today, your hits from Yahoo will remain consistent.

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