Okay, that’s a huge lie.

Sure, Apple may be killing off Flash on their products and HTML 5 can explode videos (among other cool stuff) but while that’s the future the present most certainly sees Flash as being around for a long while.

The <video> tag may (very) slowly kill off Flash videos but you won’t be seeing the end of games and sites built with with Flash for a while.

Some facts (and by facts I mean things that I’m currently thinking)

• Flash has about a 98% adoption rate on non-iPhone/iPad products. That won’t change any time soon and despite it’s flaws it’s still a very good way to embed video. Remember Adobe have been doing this for 10 years and HTML is only just starting to do this.
• Begun the codec wars has and until there’s a victor or agreement between H.264 and Ogg is resolved, HTML 5 adoption is going to be hurt a lot. This could potentially even have a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray type outcome with people being reluctant to jump on the new tech and something better (digital distribution in that example) is almost ready.
• It will be long time until everyone’s browser can display HTML 5. Surprisingly it doesn’t work in IE6! By the time companies update their browsers and even all browsers are able to display videos in HTML 5 it could be close to 2020!
• If HTML 5 video doesn’t work in some unforseen aspect how will it be updated? Do we wait 10 years for HTML 6? While browser developers will be able to make edits to how things display themselves (bonus!) when I think about how the different browsers render just now I don’t look forward to seeing another element that will require hacks.
• How can videos be monetised in HTML 5? Forcing viewers to watch an ad before showing the clip is possible in Flash, and I guess you can add ads directly to the video before uploading but I don’t see how it’s possible to append an ad to the beginning of a video (which doesn’t mean it isn’t) in HTML 5. Somebody smarter than me care to wade in? Overlay ads should still be possible but if H.264 charges $2,000 (per region) for videos over 12 minutes that you receive revenue on it’s going to be pretty expensive running ads on these videos (again, unless Ogg wins).
• The play/pause controls on HTML 5 are ugly as sin.
• Actionscript, Flex and Flash still allow more creativity than Javascript, HTML and CSS. That’s not to say things can’t be accomplished with HTML.
• What HTML 5 may mean is more people disabling Flash in their browser (like an adblocker) this could cause problems for publishers. As an inconvenience, disabling and enabling Flash to watch a video is a pain in the ass. If I could still do 99% of what I want on the web but see 50% less ads I’d be inclined to just disable Flash entirely.
• Will HTML 5 actually kill Silverlight more than Flash?
• Will SVG get a boost from HTML 5?
• How well does it do porn?

Okay, I’m done. HTML 5 raises a lot of issues (and a lot of SEO opportunities!) but I don’t see it killing Flash off just yet.

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It’s called Flash’n'SEO.

Check out their experiments page to get the inside scoop on Flash indexing, plus they have an absolutely pimp design going on.

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“I love that easytweets lets me set up a whole day tweeting for my multiple commercial accounts in less than 30 minutes a day”

To which I replied

“@graywolf Tweeting for business. You’re doing it wrong.”

Which was slightly mis-interpreted as if I thought businesses shouldn’t use Twitter, which is why he wrote back

“@StalkerB tweeting for business is wrong? you wanna rethink that tweet and do it over”

While I was elaborating slightly with

“@graywolf Depends what Tweets you schedule, pumping out promos every hour instead of interacting with people is not what it’s about, is it?”

So, my initial response wasn’t at all to do with businesses not using Twitter but everything to do with how I see the use of Twitter. After a bit of reflection I thought I should make that view clearer.

Twitter is the new web darling and after 3 years (birthday soon?) on the go seems poised to be jumped on by every business, marketer and spammer around; although it’s still a few years away from being used by your mum. It provides a unique opportunity for group level discussion and answers from companies to consumers but if history proves anything it’s that companies don’t know how to interact with customers and new media will be ignored or abused.

The absolute best thing about Twitter (to me) is how instant it is. The instant search is brilliant http://search.twitter.com/, Twitscoop let’s me see what people are buzzing about that I didn’t even know existed and the breaking news that sweeps across the Twit-o-sphere (that’s not a word, please don’t repeat it anywhere) is nothing short of a phenomenon.

As for what prompted my comment, EasyTweets is a great tool when used well but as companies get on board they’re not going to appreciate the value in interacting on Twitter so some poor sap is going to have to write a regimented 5 Tweets a day on corporate BS and will use EasyTweet to do it. Alternatively @TwitterSpammer (not registered, get on it!) will set up 100 accounts each to Tweet the same link to some shoddy money making scheme and now be able to do so quickly and efficiently.

So with all that in mind, scheduling Tweets for 4/8/16+ hours from now seems like a bad idea and not being online to manage Twitter campaign responses also seems to be ‘doing it wrong’.

Having now had time to reflect there are a few issues I didn’t immediately consider.

1) ‘Tweets don’t kill people’, just because the tool could be used poorly doesn’t mean that it can’t be used well. A good example would be to let customers know of an upcoming sale, where stock is limited and getting in before the event is a must. If your business knows that the prices will update on the website (or brick and mortar) at 13:00, a Tweet a few hours earlier will make sure users turn up to get a bargain.

I assume that Michael knows what he’s doing and the ‘doing it wrong’ wasn’t based on knowing what his commercial Tweets were about. So I apologise for claiming otherwise if you read this.

2) If you spam me I don’t have to follow you. Even assuming Michael did nothing but Tweet every hour on the hour about bargain iphones I can easily distance myself from him by stopping following and thereby not even see the offending Tweets.

That’s all I have time for on my lunch, so I’ll leave it there.

The end of the Twitversation (that’s another made up word, don’t let it catch on) finished with

“@graywolf No, business Tweeting is good. Tweeting for Tweeting’s sake is bad. Like I say, depends what’s scheduled.”
“@StalkerB develop a profile where ppl are used to U tweeting links yours and others, pass back thru and answer @ and DM’s how is that wrong”
“@graywolf Sorry, can’t read that last Tweet “

I still can’t make out the implied punctuation for “where ppl are used to U tweeting links yours and others” (is this to do with Tweets that include links or that the act of Tweeting intrinsically links you to other people?) but now see that as long as you monitor the responses that scheduling a Tweet may be okay.

I guess I should follow this up at some point with “Twitter for business. You’re doing it right!”, maybe tomorrow

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Behold it’s glory!

Basically an update on the old buzz wire game that kids of yore played.

Full details can be found on the SEO Buzzer page and the winner gets a review on my blog and an ad for the month in a slot of their choosing.

Game was created by Galaxy Graphics who offer customisable and bespoke Flash games for a very reasonable fee. I’d like to thank Michael for putting in the hard work when Wordpress wouldn’t display it and then when my database wouldn’t record the scores. The delay in putting this page live is certainly not a reflection of how long it takes them to create a games, which was actually ready 3 days after I ordered it.

Hopefully some people enjoy this but after 6 months of practise I’m fed up of it and I can get round in a little over 10 seconds, as it’d be unfair I’ve removed those scores from the table

Please make sure you leave an email address you can be contacted on if you want the prize as I’ll have no other way of getting in touch.

Comments are enabled on the page if you want to brag about which fast time is yours or to lament that final 7 second penalty that cost you the win.

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Traffic graph

Here’s a graph of one of the (what seems like) 5o sites that I launched this year (hopefully explains why I update so rarely).

The orange line represents the number of keywords this new site was getting found for and the blue line represents what percentage of traffic was coming through search engines.

Then in August some guy gets a lucky banner on a previously undiscovered popular site  and my success suddenly pales in comparison

That’s 5 keywords in January (launched late January, brand terms only and probably someone in the office searching for them), to 1072 in Novemeber (and back to 904 in December) and topping out at 50.57% traffic share in August, dropping all the way down to 8.44% in October.

Still, the more people coming to the site the better, there’s no I in team.

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This plugin displays your tag cloud in the form of a globe.

I’ve never really been a fan of word clouds since they first appeared (and seemed to do wonders for SEO… briefly) and despite having had the tag cloud on this blog since the beginning I was considering ditching it, or getting a nofollow plugin for them (the pages themselves are already noindex but seemed silly to leak Page Rank [as we all know PR is the defining factor of SEO*]).

Instead I’ll just cripple search engines ability to follow the links, although I may set up another site to see if they manage to crawl the links in widget as Google now claims.

Anyway, here’s a big version for you to see.

*If you think this is true you are an idiot

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Hopefully this standardised option will allow webmasters and optimisers useful info on visitors.

So What Does It Do?

This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

What Do I Need?

Flex or Flash with ActionScript 3 and Flex or Flash Visual Components.

Full story can be read on the Official Analytics Blog.

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When doing your keyword research it’s worth finding out what Google thinks people are searching for when they enter that keyword term. For example if you are optimising for the term ‘football’ (Soccer) then simply type that term into Google and scroll to the bottom of the page.

You’ll be presented with 8 links that looks like

Google clearly links your search with the “+ terms” of games, pictures, boots, rules, results, live and history. It also throws a curve ball of rugby in there. So now you have 8 new terms to optimise a landing page for which could be generating significant traffic from your main term if people click through on these links (and people love to click rather than type).

Sometimes it does throw up some pretty random results, searching for ‘cheese’ gives me the + term ‘games’ (if anybody knows what a cheese game is please tell me) but somebody somewhere is searching for this. You might as well have the traffic over some other site and it’s all about the longtail.

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To make up for it I will now present you with 5 quick and easy on page SEO tips that AREN’T along the lines of Title Tags… blah blah blah… keywords… blah blah blah… internal links & nofollow… blah blah… small file sizes… blah.

1) Link your Header <h1> to the page it’s on.

It’s an <h1> tag linking to your page and it still counts.

2) Create a second UNIQUE page about the same subject and link between them both.

That way when you do rank for a word you can get a second indent, knocking a competitor both down a place and another out of that page ranking.

3) Go vertical.

Almost falls into the blah section but shove an optimised pic or video into an article because if nothing else it keeps the reader’s attention when looking at an otherwise dry article. Should BrowseRank and time on page become a factor (like for Adwords Quality Score) it may keep people around that little bit longer too.

4) Shove a noscript tag in even if the page doesn’t execute a script.

Might be a slightly controversial move but in theory the spiders will read both and double your content count (assuming your text is optimised this shouldn’t be a bad thing). Do make sure it is the exact same content though and don’t spam the noscript tag. If you’re running off a CMS you may add some sort of javascript later that causes problems and you’re not technically doing anything wrong

5) Do everything “blah”.

All the blah parts are the basics and should be done for every page. Title, Headers, Desciptions, Keywords, content, alts, internal links, rel=nofollow are all important (more so than what I’ve mentioned) and need to be done for any on page optimisation.

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Today I have been mostly desphinning articles.

I’m a big fan of Sphinn as an SEM niche news aggregator/social media site and I make it easy, for you the reader, to Sphinn up any of my posts through the widgets at the bottom of them. I don’t believe in Sphinning my own posts as it seems to be poor taste to show off this way to ones peers, but one day I hope that somebody will decree that what I’ve written is worth sharing with a larger audience. (Current Sphinns at time of writing – 0).

Whilst recently, due my limited time, I have just been looking at the Hot Topics section (I don’t want to miss anything) today I have started to look at the upcoming news and was quite surprised that it doesn’t have all that much blatant promotion going on.

Whether some people are like me and don’t start by submitting themselves or perhaps that others are desphinning them before I see them or simply that people realise that marketing to marketers isn’t a great idea but there was only two or three articles in the first few pages that I didn’t think deserved to be there. Most can be weeded out from the title alone (although I always check the page out before proceeding) but some look like spam but in reality aren’t.

Here are some examples.

SEO Consultation Google SEO

Somewhat keyword stuffed title that appears to be offering a service. Upon reading the page my initial assumptions are correct and I desphunn the article for not being news.

Bollywood Actress and more  

This looks at first glance like spam. Again I clicked through and right enough it was as the title said and nothing to do with SEM or any sort of marketing. I reported it as spam and moved on.

2 other articles I’d reported as spam had already been removed in the time it took me to report them and write this.

Get Back Links and Make Money with Infobarrel

At first glance this doesn’t look any better than the first two examples, however I read the article as usual and this was a genuine explanation of how to get links and make money with Infobarrel. No affiliate links in the text and on a decent PR3 homepage blog.

Now I don’t doubt that some other links on this guys page are paid for, however such is the online marketing world.

If you’ve not yet checked out Sphinn I’d recommend you do and I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on Sphinning yourself and what sort of things they desphinn/spam.

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