Dr. Ralph Wilson is one of the pioneers in Internet marketing. Here’s a video he recently made with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg on continuous improvement for small businesses. This is a great video for any small business owner, but there are two things I’d like to point out about it. First, the video:

• First bullet point: He’s using YouTube as a marketing tool. Here, Dr. Wilson demonstrates how YouTube can be used to market your business with a professional quality video that targets your niche customer. You can do that too!
• Second bullet point: Dr. Wilson, Sterne, and Eisenberg all point out that continuous improvement for small businesses boils down to one thing - do the most important thing first. The bottom line is, you are growing your web business for your site visitors. What can you do to make it better for them? That’s what you should be doing.

In order for continuous improvement to work, you’ve got to set aside some time to evaluate and analyze your business. Time alone. It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour, but you’ve got to put it on your schedule. I like what Jim Sterne said about making a list of the things you did in the last two things and pay someone $10 per hour to do those things that are taking up your time and that anyone can do. Pay them minimum wage, whatever. But clean your plate for the really important things.

Kalena Jordan, who I thought was on top of things pretty well, has discovered that Google now crawls Flash. Of course, those of us who have been keeping up have known about this for at least a month.

This is indeed good news, but there are still boundaries you should give your design team with regard to Flash files. The primary boundary is don’t build an index page that is entirely made of Flash. It will be a disaster for your website. And while we’re busy making rules, don’t build any page on your website that consists solely of Flash.

Google may be able to crawl Flash, but this crawl is a limited crawl. Text and links in Flash are now crawlable, but the images are still to be treated like any other image and since Flash is primarily image oriented, that leaves a lot of real estate that will go uncrawled. Essentially, if you have one line of text and a link in your Flash file, which takes up your entire page, then all Google will see is this:

This is one line of text (here’s the link)

The other search engines won’t even see that, which means that your search engine marketing will be limited to Google. I think, for most small businesses, it’s a bad practice to get into to rely on just one search engine for traffic - even if it is Google with its lion’s share of searchers. You can still get good qualified traffic from Yahoo! and MSN, and, yes, even AOL and Ask. So don’t count them out.

If you are going to use Flash in your website then use a Flash video surrounded by text for better optimization or put Flash in your header and have a completely textual web page well-designed with graphic enhancements just as you’ve got right now. Until Google figures out how to crawl images, text is still the crown on the king of content. The old principles of web design still apply.

PROBLEM: Over 73% of the people looking to make a purchase of any type first research that purchase online. If your site doesn’t rank well with the search engines, it’s like you don’t exist!

SOLUTION: The 7 Things You Can Do to Make Google Fall in Love with Your Website

Plus

How to Turn Your Business Blog into a Search Engine Magnet

This new workshop, presented by Caroline Melberg of Small Business Mavericks. The workshop will cover the following essential topics for small businesses:

- Search Engine Optimization – what is it?
- Why Search Engine Optimization is critical to your online success
- The 7 things you can do to make Google fall in love with your website
- Blogging – what it is and why you should care
- How to launch your own business blog – the right way
- How to use your business blog as a search engine magnet

The date is September 16 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. To register, go to www.SocialWebTraining.com.

I stumbled across this website called www.dontclick.it. Of course, the concept is intriguing, but the thought crossed my mind, How would this concept affect SEO if it were to roll out across the entire Web?

First, the site is designed entirely in Flash. In order for it to do very well in the search engines at all, Flash would have to move beyond its current state of interest and the search engines would need to capability of crawling them. That’s already happening to some degree. But Google would have to to do better than that in order for Flash sites to be indexed the same way that HTML sites are now. That’s for starters.

Another thing that I think would happen if the entire Web looked this way is meta tags would go out of fashion completely. There’d be no need for them. If the search engines could crawl the Flash files and read the text and images for indexing purposes then there’d be no need for meta tags whatsoever. They’d completely disappear.

The most obvious issues related to search engine spiders would be the links. Since we’re talking about mouseover effects inside of Flash, there might be an issue with the search engines being able to crawl those links - at least at their present stage of development. Google has been known, however, to find solutions for its algorithms based on new developments in design so it is not entirely impossible that Google couldn’t figure that out. And what Google does the other search engines are sure to follow.

Still, the biggest downfall of a Flash-dominated Web would be the interlinking. Would webmasters still want to link out using mouseover links? Today, if you want to leave a website to get to another, you have to click a link and that takes a conscious effort. What about if you simply had to mouseover it?

You could make the mouseover require an action like swiveling the mouse in order to activate the link, or add a timer, but each method has some drawbacks. No matter, there would still be some SEO ramifications to any of these solutions. Would link building still have the same effect that it has today?

I realize some of this may be over the heads of readers who are new to the Web development and are still trying to figure out why linking matters at all. But eventually these questions will have to be answered. I see Flash becoming a more important part of the Web, but just how important remains to be seen. And, of course, like any new development, there will be adjustments. But the SEO part of the equation is one that I find intriguing and am somewhat concerned. Does anyone else share that concern?