Marketing - Tutorials and Articles

When designing skyscraper banners (160×600 and 130×160…etc.) try incorporating your logo in to the top and bottom portions of your banner layouts.
If you only want to include one logo, try positioning the logo in the top or middle portions of the banner.
If you only include your brand identity at the bottom, it’s will most likely fall below the fold (below the initial browser window area) and out of view of the user. Having a logo atop of the banner insures the viewer will be able to identity the brand associated with the message and call to actions.

I was searching for a free SEO web tool recently and stumbled across this site. I put this domain name in the search form  and it quickly pointed out a few necessary tweaks that I over looked in putting together my blog. You can never be a 100% sure that your site is SEO certified. This tool crawls your site like the Google bot and displays your meta data. From there, it will make suggestion on things you should fix or tips on how to enhance your site’s SEO performance.

http://www.spidertest.com/index.php

There are a number of stock sites that allow freelancers to submit their creative assets be sold through their site. The percentage of what you can earn is dependent on how many sells your asset generates. Check out these popular stock site for submissions.

Fotolia:

http://us.fotolia.com/Info/Contributors

iStockPhoto:

http://www.istockphoto.com/sell-stock-photos.php

Brandstack:

http://brandstack.com/home

Campaign Monitor:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/designers/

I’ve been thinking about how much I should charge for online banner ads placement on a few of my personal websites. Here are a few nuggets of information I found while search for guidance. (more…)

Google learns to crawl Flash
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files…
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

How to SEO Flash
•    Search Engines and Flash
•    Requirements for Successful Use of Flash
•    SEO Flash Programming
•    Example: Making Flash Home Page Spiderable
•    Scalable Inman Flash Replacement
Source: http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml

Here are a few comments on this topic from SearchEngineGuide.com:
“Stoney, You hit the nail on the head and pounded it down with one stroke. I completely agree, I have turned down clients in my own business due to flash sites. Now that I am with an agency I find Flash more common, as many of the businesses are big enough and niched enough where they feel that they don’t need SEO for their website. Oddly enough they are often right. Unfortunately SEO can have a big effect on PPC marketing, and most of these accounts suffer from bad keyword quality scores and thus higher click costs in AdWords.”

“Susan: I disagree slightly. Mostly because it all comes down to the intent. Building a flash only website for Ozzy Osbourne is fine, but e-commerce is not. I think you know what I mean”

“ Working on seo for hotel sites, I’ve come across some stunning creative sites designed with Flash. If the designers had thoughtfully used the Flash applications to “wow” site visitors, ie embedding in otherwise SE-friendly pages, it could be a win-win situation.
Perhaps all of you have seen the June info about making Flash SE-friendly. ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html )”
Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/why-i-still-wont-seo-flash-websites.php

And from SearchEngineJournal.com:
“Disney does it. And so does Oprah. Even my favorite pizza place does it…  Granted these are extreme cases of sites which use flash extensively, but there are other cases where even a little flash can be improperly used. There are also cases where flash is not only appropriate, it is recommended. The question then becomes how to best use flash without affecting search engine rankings”

“Yeah this article doesn’t help a bit. I thought after reading I would be able to find a solution for my all flash website for seo purposes. Thefwa.com is an all flash website, they rank no.1, they didn’t follow your mumbo jumbo about not using too much flash” (Note from Alex: TheFWA.com does not rank no.1. They rank 31,905. Still not bad for an all flash site.)
Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/flash-and-seo-using-flash-on-websites/2247/

Cool online tool that will probe a flash file:

http://www.flashprobe.com/

Take the example given at etravelblackboard.com, on the conception of Google. Google did not rely on SEO to become the number one search engine on the planet. It relied heavily on quality of the brand. People fail in love with it, and became buzz Worthy.  You have to build a quality product first than launch your brand site. Once you do, use all the tools necessary to maintain a healthy and profitable web site by review your analytics, inspire brand loyalty, build direct traffic, and perhaps affiliate networks, so that SEO and SEM aren’t the only source for your B2P or B2B.

For more example of why SEO and SEM is not the end all to marketing your band site, just take a look at all of the brand site listed on TheFWA.com site. There you will find hot sexy sites all done in flash (flash is a SEO killer), yet I don’t believe these company are fearful of losting business even though their sites are not SEO complient. Why is that? For kicks, please leave your thought below as to my these companies contenue to use flash and other media that are not conducive to high page ranking.