Adobe has finally publicly acknowledged their very important problem with SEO and Flash and has made an effort to make Flash content easier for search engines (specifically Yahoo! and Google) to index by collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!.
From the press release:
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
While I do see this as an great thing, I would still recommend developers use SWFAddress to ensure deep linking to your content. I can see how both search engines would be able to pick up the content properly, but it would surprise me if the indexing is able to tell a user where that content lives within the site. It will be interesting to see how the content is indexed.
In summary, here’s how to optimize a poorly performing page on your website:
Find your high value landing pages
What pages on your site have high entrances and high bounce rates? These are the “high value” pages that are begging to be optimized.
What’s the desired goal (or conversion) for the site?
In other words, what is the ideal outcome of a visit to your site? Some common online conversions include account signup, new lead generation, joining a mailing list, or purchasing a product.
Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track how well your landing page is funneling people toward your desired conversion
Create a new design for the landing page you want to test
Test it!
We were told at the LunaMetrics training session that you can expect actionable results within about a month, depending on the traffic to the page being tested. You could see statistically significant results in as little as two weeks in some circumstances.
Talk to Caleb or me if you want to know more about website optimization or if you have questions about the jargon. We’ve been scouting a few pages on our sites in need of optimization and could always use more practice.
Finally, the Website Optimizer team has a blog that’s worth a look. I recommend starting with this case study, in which conventional wisdom about the use of imagery on the homepage is tested.
While perusing the ever important osflash.org in preparation for some upcoming flash work, I came across some really great open source flash projects I thought might be interesting to some.
Facilitates easy navigation of video, audio and image assets as well as effects, transitions and themes. Media can simply be dragged into the timeline for inclusion in a mash.
Ajax Animator is a free open source web based flash ide designed for simplicity and community effort.
The only issue I have with osflash is that a lot of the projects are out-dated and not removed or tagged as being so, and it can become difficult to figure out if it is still applicable.
I haven’t used it enough to be sure whether I trust the numbers, but it’s the first site I’ve seen that tries to distill SEO down to a single number. It’s worth checking out.
7 minute overview of how to get actionable metrics for non-ecommerce sites. In other words, how do you measure success when you don’t sell anything?
Summary:
Look at distributions, not averages. Averages lie.
Three pieces of data are particularly valuable on non-ecommerce websites: time spent on site, visitor recency (when was the last time a visitor visited the site), and depth of visit (how many pages did the visitor consume?)
Focus on the distributions of data for all three of these metrics. Averages lie.
