Today I’ve found (after following a multitude of links - all nofollowed of course) a few ads done by some web agency which are doing a copy of the pc/mac ads in the form of seo website/flash website. They claim many things about flash and SEO, which is why I’ve taken a bit of my time to comment this stuff which I find to be incorrect and a bit shortsighted.

First video is about … well, I don’t know since it doesn’t load… It’s called counter one and it simply fails to even load the spinning ajax like thingie which buffers the video. So flash… you lose one point here… I found out that it was about the fact that you get many hits but few stay around from SEO, resulting in a high bounce rate. Which, brace yourselves, is crap again. SEO means you build highly relevant pages for what the people are searching, it means that when a user gets to your website he finds a page which is completely and only about what he wants and he was searching for. It doesn’t get more targeted than that.

Second video refers to the interpretation of websites differently in different browsers and on different OSes and how flash is cross-platform and SEO and CSS is not. Well, not so much. You see, as I said in my previous post, flash is crap when it comes to mobile technology. And don’t forget that includes pocket PCs. And trust me there is nothing more annoying than trying to find the address of a business via your phone or wifi only to find that that website is one big flash file and it doesn’t help me at all… Also, if you do have any doubt whatsoever about how your website looks in another browser, OS, etc, all you have to do is head on down to browsershots.org and test it. It’s simple, takes about an hour for all combinations (and about a couple of minutes for just the most popular) and you get nice screenshots from all browsers. So if there is any mess, there’s a simple way to check for it. But my opinion is html has a lot more potential to display properly than flash in some cases. I’ve had some popouts, you know those flash ads that grow until they take over half the screen, which refused to close, or which got partly caught somehow under the website itself, so flash is in no way a sure win. So this is bogus.

Numero tres is about how SEO sites are full of useless articles and whitepapers which no one reads. Well, I’ve been looking at a non-SEO website from my local Pampers and they are full of articles. It’s all about baby care and all that and… well, someone must be reading all that, right. SEO articles are made especially for the customer, so that when they look for something, they find all that they could be searching for. Now, I am preaching SEO here I know but basically it doesn’t matter if you’re there to shop, research or just look around, it’s a lot better if you do it on our site than the competitor’s. And what if no one reads an article? I’ve had blogs in my life made out of my (then) childish belief that people care about what I’m doing at that moment (like a lame version of twitter, but in a blog) and there were people who actually read the stuff. So content is never for the search engines. We don’t care about the search engines, SEO is about people, and how they can reach the website more easily and greeted with friendlier messages than regular static shiny-but-useless pages. So I’m sorry guys but having too much content (but structured properly) beats having too little any day.

Video four, and I can’t believe someone took the time to make so many, is about how SEO websites are stripped down of frames (that’s ALWAYS a good thing, and I say that as a user) but also flash, complex layouts and even images. That’s pretty wild. Sure, an all-flash site would be something I would tear down if I could since even Google, who has made some progress in reading flash content, would have a lot of trouble indexing it. But SEO maintains some flash (like site navigation, or animations and such), and layouts are what CSS was born for. And images, they rarely get removed, since it kills the website overall look, and usually just get a plain text addition to them which makes it easier for customers to understand what they’re about. SEO optimized sites are not boring, they’re a lot more interesting than regular sites (especially if they’re optimized for social media networks - SMO).

Video five refers to link exchanges (or reciprocal links) and how they make visitors leave your page bla bla bla… Thing is nowadays reciprocal links are not so important in SEO, since PR is transferred both ways and it’s really easy for Google to see it goes both ways. It’s a nobrainer that reciprocal links are just for the sake of it. So we don’t use them that much anymore. But even if we did, it doesn’t mean people will leave our website and go on, or if they do, it’s because that site offers what they want and not ours. Since SEO is basically very precise targetting of your customers, all that reach your site and get bounced must have ended up there in error. And there are many such people, for any kind of website really. What I am against though is running ads on websites. I was looking at the Microsoft website today and they had ads in a place for Vista Ultimate users. Is Microsoft that poor? It looks unprofessional and it can get people distracted. And more, people can see the ads as co-branding and therefore you will get your brand image dilluted and marketing dollars down the drain because you wanted to run adult friendly services as a banner for 1000$ a month. But I’m steering off course.

Vid six. High traffic and high bounce rate means low lead generation. If you mess up your SEM strategy, sure. If you think your viewers are all on your website to buy your product and know how to get there, sure. But in an SEO environment, I think not. You see, that would happen if you only optimized your homepage, and had little content on it, like is the case with a flash website… People come, see the fancy graphics and move on, because they’re not there for graphics, they want the products or the info. But SEO creates landing pages, and AdWords campaign usually generates tens if not hundreds of landing pages, optimized for each keyword and search term so who gets there is more likely to stay. You see, lead generation is a big part of SEO. This video has a different end tough, focusing on Google algorithm changes, but those are not so important. A recent one has been the Google position six “penalty” which appears to have been a glitch at Google and is now remedied. So, unless you’re black hat and trying to game the search engines, SEO done right is proper and lasts.

There are about ten more videos, which I really do not have the patience to go through, but it’s safe to say it’s a bit narrowminded and the SEO shortcomings and practices they mention resemble more SEO done in 1998 rather than integrated online marketing solutions in 2008 (SEO+SEM+SMO+ad campaigns+competitive analysis+usability studies and testing).

I won’t add a link to the videos because that’s what they want, they want traffic by badmouthing SEO, and then they will say that it’s organic, due to their amazing (read crappy plagiarisms) videos. So if you’re really that curious drop an email or just a comment and I’ll give them to you.

And as always, the feed is waiting for you to subscribe, because tomorrow is a new day and there are a lot of amazing SEO tips coming up, like a very very interesting list of all SEO factors ranked by importance. Now would you want to miss that?