Online Advertising - Google Adwords etc

Rollo Tamasi

To see for yourself how well spiders can read your site download the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and disable flash, css and javascript. What you should be left it is unformatted text, links and images. If you can read all your content and navigate from page to page then every spider that visits your site should be able to index your pages.

DJB

tomED wrote:

From your website point of view, ok most of us here will recognise that it's a purchased template, however I'm sure your target market won't notice any difference. But there are a few things I would change, most notably the navigation. With the last update of IE6, it included a protection for flash movies and java applets where you have to click on the item to make it active. I have seen with many of my clients, that they get frustrated with this and think a site doesnt work, because when they click on it, it does not go anywhere.... I would suggest getting rid of this!

Tom... there's another way of embedding flash into the page without <embed> or <object> that doesn't require you to click on it before being able to do something inside the flash. See swfobject:

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

Rgds,

Dave

tomED

DJB wrote:

Tom... there's another way of embedding flash into the page without <embed> or <object> that doesn't require you to click on it before being able to do something inside the flash. See swfobject:

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

Rgds,

Dave

Hi Dave,

Yes, I know thanks, but my point was to prevent it from happening to enhance usability.

I never said anything about removing the flash itself. I was merely pointing out that he should get rid of this obstacle.

Tom

Zascar

Cheers for all the help lads I'm going to have a hack at this over the next few weeks. No doubt I'll be back with more questions. Any more advice you can think of I'd love to hear it!

DJB

tomED wrote:

Hi Dave,

Yes, I know thanks, but my point was to prevent it from happening to enhance usability.

I never said anything about removing the flash itself. I was merely pointing out that he should get rid of this obstacle.

Tom

NP, Tom... I guess you're comment of "I would suggest getting rid of this" led me believe you meant get rid of the flash altogether and not the "click to activate" flash, which you meant. At least Zascar has the resource to do it now!

tomED

DJB wrote:

NP, Tom... I guess you're comment of "I would suggest getting rid of this" led me believe you meant get rid of the flash altogether and not the "click to activate" flash, which you meant. At least Zascar has the resource to do it now!

Yep - terrible writing on my behalf! Apologies!

vito

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

Here is an indication of the sites that are linking to yours
http://wholinkstome.com/?url=http://www.efconsulting.ie/

Can anybody else recommend a decent inbound links dectector site?

Here's a good read to explain more about inbound linkage
http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/link-popularity-improvement/google-inbound-links.php

domain-pop.com/backlink-link-checker-US-1.php?URL=

not bad

also take a look at the free backlinks tool at www.seobook.com - I have tried it but not tested enough to validate the results.

On the topic of doamin names, I think that having a keyword rich domain name can help get you listed in Google SERPs more quickly.

You should definitely look at a IBL building campaign of some description. I wouldnt bother with most of the Irish directories - many have masked redirects rather than direct URLs - these dont help with SEO whatsoever.

Google site: command has been broken for yonks - dont bother with it unless you know what you're at.

'-' is better than '_' - SE's see '-' as space but google also now is clever enought to see 'wordswithoutspaces' as 'words without spaces' very often.

Try sitemaps but be prepared to take it down and check the google index: command. I have heard of countless times when the submission of a sitemap has hurt the density of your Google index. This has been backed up by people removing the sitemap and their index jumping significantly. I think that sitemaps might not yet be 100%.

tomED

vito wrote:

On the topic of doamin names, I think that having a keyword rich domain name can help get you listed in Google SERPs more quickly.

I don't agree with this at all. Any new site is treated exactly the same. The best technique to try avoid the google sandbox is to get a few good strong links back to your website. A page with a PR of 5 or higher is a good start.

vito wrote:

I wouldnt bother with most of the Irish directories - many have masked redirects rather than direct URLs - these dont help with SEO whatsoever.

Not true, yes a lot of them do, but look at www.searchme.ie - that includes a direct link. www.search.ie and www.browse.ie give direct links, the problem with these links are that you have to dig very deep to get them which means the pagerank of the final page is very low, however, search engines other than google will pick these links up, so it's all not in vain.

vito wrote:

Google site: command has been broken for yonks - dont bother with it unless you know what you're at.

Google site command has never been broken.... what are you trying to do?
Site just gives a list of pages that google have listed in their index relating to your domain. e.g. http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-18,GGLG:en&q=site%3Awww%2Etomdoyletalk%2Ecom
This is a great way to see if Google has indexed all the pages on your website.

vito wrote:

'-' is better than '_' - SE's see '-' as space but google also now is clever enought to see 'wordswithoutspaces' as 'words without spaces' very often.

Google seems clever enough to pick up words without spaces, but it doesn't give as much weight to them.

vito

My bad WRT the site: command - I had meant the link: command but that wasn't under discussion here.

I would say that a large proportion of the Irish directories use masked redirects. Yep a few newer directories are SEO friendly (e.g. Michele's site) but there are not so many Irish directories anyhow. I was suggesting that time might be better spent targeting resources other than Irish directories.

Google seems clever enough to pick up words without spaces, but it doesn't give as much weight to them.

Out of curiosity what are you basing this on?

I think that one of the best things I have ever learnt about SEO is that it is 90% opinion and 10% fact.

mneylon

vito wrote:

I would say that a large proportion of the Irish directories use masked redirects. Yep a few newer directories are SEO friendly (e.g. Michele's site) but there are not so many Irish directories anyhow.

A lot of them are dmoz parsers or flash in the pan type sites. Only a very small number of sites have been around for any length of time and you'll see a lot of the new ones vanishing as their owners realise that they can't get the traffic to sustain them

tomED

vito wrote:

Out of curiosity what are you basing this on?

The many sites I have worked on.

vito

tomED wrote:

The many sites I have worked on.

I dont doubt that you know what you are on about. You have done a great job with some of the client sites you reference on your site (I have to wonder how much that soliditor fella has made).

I'll slot this into my 90% opinion folder and keep an eye on it