The other day I consulted for the largest Agency in the state about Flash and SEO. Specifically how to get Flash on the top of the Google Ranking. As part of the presentation I described the 2 types of results that you want to score high on. The first is "Most Popular" searches and the second is the long tail results. Through this I gathered some data about the CurtisMorley.com site and thought it would make an interesting post showing what results this site has been able to produce. It also gives quick reference to some of the errors.
*Disclaimer Google Search results change daily this information is accurate as of the day of this posting.
Most Common Google Search Terms for Flex /Flash Errors
Thank you everyone for voting for my new logo. I had a great response. This is the winner. Using Google Analytics and Flash I was able to tell how many people voted, how many voted after viewing all the logos and how many people voted prematurely. I can tell how much time people spent on each logo, whether they preferred black-and-white or color and of course which logo was voted most popular among my readers. Look for the tutorial on how to do this with Flash/Flex coming soon.
I am going to post every day this month. Most posts with be ActionScript Errors but I will also include tutorials and Flash SEO and Google Analytics reports and info. Sometimes just for kicks I will throw in some marketing and random thoughts. So look for daily post in May.
FYI - Because Sunday is a special day for me I will not be posting on Sundays but will make up for that on other days.
What is the most effective way to use Google Analytics and Flash?
How would you like to be able to know exactly how people are accessing your site and what they do when they are there? With Flash you can. And Google has provided the back end system free of charge for you to do it. It is called Google Analytics.
Google and Flash can show you exactly what people are doing on your site. I know how many people are mousing over the Flash piece. I know how many people are clicking a certain button. I know how many times a button is rolled-over without being clicked. I know how long the mouse is over the object. I can know every piece of data that is possible to know about what and how my users are interacting with the page, advertisement or application.
There are three key components in using Google Analytics combined with your Flash/Flex application or website. First is determining what you want tracked and how you want to use the statistics, the second is creating a Google Analytics account and setting up the proper filters etc.., the third is setting up the code in Flash and Javascript.
This is part 1 of a 5 part series on how to accomplish each of these areas.
Stay tuned for
Part 2 - "What Flash events should & shouldn't be tracked with Google Analytics?" coming soon.
I am putting up a test experiment for a Flash class that I built that will add a lot of functionality to the Google Analytics. Please help me test out my class by simply playing with the Flash objects below. Mouse over them click on them, just leave your mouse alone and do nothing at all.
The purpose of this Flash and Google Analytics experiment is to get more granular data about how the user interacts with the Flash object. The class I've created will tell me how long it takes people before they interact with the piece, how long they are interacting with it, how many times the user mouses-over, clicks, etc...
Thanks for the help in testing this. I will post results next week.
In my quest to build beautiful, exciting, and effective websites with Flash I decided to come up with a list of 20,000+ keywords for submission to Google etc... I wrote a little script that would combine keywords to make additional keywords. I created a few arrays with certain terms that would play nice with other terms. I then ran the script and tried to loop through each Array and combine the terms to create keyword phrases or Google Food as Gregory Cox would put it. I thought that Flash would be able to concatenate the string and push it into a text field on the stage without any problem. It turns out that Flash has a huge issue with writing to the text box each time it updated and ran through the loop.
The match was like Mike Tyson against Michael Spinks or Carl "The Truth" Williams. In less than 95 secs each was easily defeated. I chatted with my Friend and Flash ExpertTyler Wright and thusly took the heavy lifting away from Flash and instead made a variable that would store the data.After the nested loops had finished I throw the variable into the text field.
The result turned everything around. Flash turned back into the superhero that it has always been and kicked it out in less than one second. I kept adding to the array to see how it would handle even more data. I also tried putting the data into a Trace statement in the same way I tried to push the data to the text box. The result was slower than writing to the text field after the loops finish but the fun part about using trace() is that it will only retain a certain number of the results. The "Output window" will retain only 9999 items according to my test. Flash will process the entire amount but will only display the last 9999.
So this is what I learned from this exercise.
Abstract the processing from the display. In other words set up a variable to store the data while looping and then only display that data when the looping is complete.
The output window will only display the last 9999 results from any trace or combined traces.
Flash AS 2 with Flash 8 can not handle repeated updates into a text field with large(really large) strings
Stay tuned for all the Search engine tips and tricks of how to optimize Flash files for optimization
"The best thing you can do for www.directpointe.com is take off all Flash from your site. This is going to sound crazy but you need to 'uglify' your site to get people to conversion." Patrick said. "Flash is the worst thing you can do to your site if you want search engines to find it."
He was very adamant about the fact that Macromedia Flash can not be crawled by search engines. Because I challenged him on this fact, he said tell me one site that uses Flash extensively and ranks on search engines.
So, I decided to take him up on the offer. Here are my findings.
I searched out what the most searched keywords are. I went with the results from Google, Yahoo, and AOL. I typed these into the search engines and this is what I came up with. This list was gathered on 8/22/06.
Websites that show up on page one of Google and use Flash extensively.
Most car manufacturer, fashion designers, sports teams, movie websites, airlines, computer makers, cell phone companies, universities, governments, etc... etc.... etc... use Macromedia Flash extensively. That seems like a lot of smart people to me. There must be a reason for using Flash to get people to conversion. The fact is that Flash can be crawled and flash elements can be effective. The days of Flash being invisible to Google and the gang are over.
Stay tuned for the next blog on how to Optimize Flash the right way for SEO and the results of making www.DirectPointe.com compelling, effective, viral, and searchable.