SEO News, Resources, and Information

The Business Case for SEO

2005-05-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting how potential clients have preconceived notions about which aspects of search engine marketing have the most value. In fact, they tend to fall into two camps that are 180° apart. The first camp believes completely in the value of pay-per-click marketing (PPC). It’s easy to understand why. PPC provides immediate and measurable benefits. The ROI of PPC marketing is obvious. This group doesn’t understand why it’s necessary “to bother” doing SEO. The second camp believes the only way to go is SEO. Clicks are free and the branding benefits of high rankings have been well documented.

The right answer is that they are both valuable. Each has its benefits and when you can afford to, you should implement both.

Pay-per-Click

PPC makes sense if you want immediate benefits and like the idea of paying for performance. SEO provides branding benefits and longer-term will provide an ROI that is compelling. But unlike PPC, SEO revenue results aren’t as directly measurable and manageable.

Pay per click (PPC) gives you the ability to have complete control over your search traffic. With PPC programs you select the keywords and write the listings. You control where you’re listed and what the listing says. You decide what your budget is and can adjust your spend rate based on results or events (e.g. announcements, promotions).

By tracking results from a PPC campaign, you can build up a knowledge base with respect to your business, including which messages perform the best, which search terms have the best conversion rates, and what destination URL is best for specific users to land on. Over time, this knowledge can help you to improve and define your business.

One of the greatest attractions of PPC is the ability to easily track clicks and costs allowing you to understand your ROI from a specific marketing initiative. This gives you confidence to spend money and drive volume. You may have thought that spending $5,000 a month on a PPC campaign is way outside your budget, but once you measure the ROI, you may realize that it’s well worth the investment.

Search Engine Optimization

So, if PPC is so great why bother with SEO? Basically, because you will be missing out on a large number of potential clicks. How large? A number of recent studies have demonstrated that there are still a lot of users that do not click on the "paid" listings but rather will search through the regular editorial search results. The accompanying chart shows that 60% of the search users prefer (some exclusively) organic over paid listings. The only way to get optimized (high) rankings in these regular editorial results is through an effective SEO program. In most cases, once you have good positioning in the regular search results, you will continue to receive “free” traffic. Again, based on data from a number of marketers the increase in traffic due to SEO averaged 73%. Consider search engine optimization the same as you would word of mouth advertising or public relations. It’s exposure that comes with a very high degree of credibility and trust. Traffic coming from traditional search listings tends to have high conversion rates.

There’s another advantage to traditional search listings. They are considered unbiased and non-commercial. Traditional search performs very well at certain points in the buying process. When consumers are gathering information about a purchase, they show a marked preference for traditional search listings. When they are ready to buy online, they seem to have less bias against paid placement listings and their likelihood to click on one of these listings increases.

The Dollars and Cents of SEO

Perhaps the most compelling reason not to exclude SEO from your online marketing strategy comes down to dollars and cents. In an attempt to quantify the business case for SEO I have gone back and done some analysis on three recent SEO engagements and the results they achieved. I chose ecommerce clients that we had optimized and reviewed their average sales before and after SEO was implemented. In two of the situations the only change made was the optimization of the site. In another the optimization occurred at the same time we implemented a PPC campaign. In the first two cases the store sales rose 64% and 75% after the SEO was implemented. In the third case the store revenue actually went up a staggering 169%, but if you back out the sales that were a result of the PPC campaign, the store revenue that could be attributed to SEO improved by 49%. In other words, the average improvement in store revenue that was apparently due to SEO was 62%.

Can we be sure that all of this was a result of SEO? No. There could have been product, seasonal and other effects that contributed. But I think it's safe to say that there was a significant increase that resulted directly from the SEO. The bottom line: search optimization has a real and measurable impact on traffic, conversions and revenue (or lead generation) improvement. Given that these clicks begin to approach “free” after amortizing the cost of SEO over time, the ROI for SEO is compelling. Added to the branding benefits no marketer or business owner should doubt the value of search engine optimization.

About the Author
Scott Smigler has been an evangelist for a serious, ROI-based focus on the online channel since he founded Exclusive Concepts (www.exclusiveconcepts.com) in 1997. Exclusive Concepts provides integrated online marketing strategies, Internet brand consulting, search engine marketing campaigns and results-oriented web sites for hundreds of clients that range in size from small ecommerce firms to public companies.

Search Engine Code

2005-05-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to leave some code in your web site to tell
the search engine spider crawlers to make your site number one? Unfortunately a
robots.txt file or robots meta tag won't do that, but they can help the crawlers
to index your site better and block out the unwanted ones.

First a little definition explaining:

Search Engine Spiders or Crawlers - A web crawler (also
known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a
methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of
all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index
the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts
with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the
hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively
browsing the Web according to a set of policies.

Robots.txt - The robots exclusion standard or
robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent well-behaved web spiders and
other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information
specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called
robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.

The robots.txt protocol is purely advisory, and relies on the cooperation of
the web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with
robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many web site administrators have been
caught out trying to use the robots file to make private parts of a website
invisible to the rest of the world. However the file is necessarily publicly
available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.

The robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care
should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final
'/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that
substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

Meta Tag - Meta tags are used to provide structured data about
data.

In the early 2000s, search engines veered away from reliance on Meta tags, as
many web sites used inappropriate keywords, or were keyword stuffing to obtain
any and all traffic possible.

Some search engines, however, still take Meta tags into some consideration
when delivering results. In recent years, search engines have become smarter,
penalizing websites that are cheating (by repeating the same keyword several
times to get a boost in the search ranking). Instead of going up rankings, these
websites will go down in rankings or, on some search engines, will be kicked off
of the search engine completely.

Index a site - The act of crawling your site and gathering
information.

How can the robots.txt file and meta tag help you?

In the robots.txt you can tell the harmful 'web crawlers' to leave your web
site alone, and give helpful hints to the ones you want to crawl your site.
Here is an example on how to disallow a web crawler to search your site:

# this identifies the wayback machine

User-agent: ia_archiver

Disallow: /

ia_archiver is the crawler name for the wayback machine that you may have
heard of, and the / after disallow tells ai_archiver not to index any of your
site. The # allows you to write comments to yourself so you
can keep track of what you typed.

Type the above three lines into notepad from your computer and save it to the
root directory of your web site as robots.txt. Web crawlers look for this
document first at a web site before doing anything else. This helps the
crawler to do its job, and helps the web site owner tell the spider what to do.
Say for instance you have some data that you don't want the crawlers to see.
(Like duplicate content for other browser referrer pages) You can deter
crawlers from indexing the 'duplicate' directory by typing this into your
robots.txt file.

Or if you would like to have the robots.txt file created for you, visit
www.rietta.com/robogen. To validate
your robots.txt file to make sure it works properly you can visit

www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

The owner of this registered company
has over twenty years experience with DOS, windows business applications, numerous
programming languages, artistic development, and web design. Other areas of
interest include web marketing, web promoting, and business marketing and
development. After the persuasion of those praising his work, he decided to go
into business himself and highly suggests everyone else to do the same.

Internet Presence was founded in 2003
from a desire to become independent. Less than 1 year later Internet Presence
has had accounts in three different states ranging from a locally owned auto
collision repair shop to a glass packaging industry that sells its product
worldwide.

What In The World Is This Google Sandbox Theory Thing? And How Do I Beat It?

2005-05-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

Ok, so over the past month or so I've been collecting various search engine optimization questions from all of you. Today, I'm going to answer what was the most frequently asked question over the past month.

You guessed it... What is the Google Sandbox Theory and how do I escape it? When you finish reading this lesson, you'll be an expert on the good 'ole Google Sandbox Theory and you'll know how to combat its effects. So, pay close attention. This is some very important stuff.

Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear: The Google Sandbox theory is just that, a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google or the benefit of years of observation.

The Google Sandbox theory has been floating around since summer 2004, and has only really gained steam after February 4, 2005 , after a major Google index update (something known as the old Google dance).

Without being able to verify the existence of a Sandbox, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

Almost everything that you will read on the Internet on the Google Sandbox theory is conjecture, pieced together from individual experiences and not from a wide-scale objective controlled experiment with hundreds of websites (something that would obviously help in determining the nature of the Sandbox, but is inherently impractical given the demand on resources).

Thus, as I'll be discussing towards the end, it's important that you focus on ‘good' search engine optimization techniques and not place too much emphasis on quick ‘get-out-of-jail' schemes which are, after all, only going to last until the next big Google update.

What is the Google Sandbox Theory?

There are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.

In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.

This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.

Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.

Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed ‘Allegra' (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.

This was a major update to Google's search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent ‘exodus' of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.

Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox effect

A common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the ‘Time Delay' factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were ‘released' in the ‘Allegra' update, this ‘website aging' theory has gained a lot of ground.

However, I don't find much truth in the ‘Time Delay' factor because by itself, it's just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.

Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the ‘Allegra' update. Along with shattering the ‘Time Delay' theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a ‘link threshold' theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.

While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive link-building campaigns. In my opinion, link-popularity is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.

This concept is known as ‘link-aging'. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the ‘age' of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.

The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have don't have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, don't you?) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results – some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the ‘Allegra' update.

How to find out if your website is ‘Sandboxed'

Finding out if your website is ‘Sandboxed' is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almost-perfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core ‘good' SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engine's weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I'm talking about, let's take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding Search Engines

If you're looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this – the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping from the Google Sandbox

Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine's algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does ‘holds back' new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website.

As the ‘Allegra' update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon – combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy – have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your website's ‘Sandboxed' time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website's ‘Sandboxed' time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don't need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the ‘white hat' rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles I've mentioned many times in this course, you'll not only minimize your website's Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Here's a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is ‘ready'. Don't make the mistake of waiting for your website to be ‘perfect'. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly – so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ‘cloaking'. Google's search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don't waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine – just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as ‘good' content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine's algorithm, whether it's a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.

by Brad Callen
Search Engine Optimization Expert
Learn How To Get A Top Google Ranking In Under 28 Days With This Breakthrough New SEO Software!
http://www.seoelite.com

Optimum SEO Keyword Density – A Real-Life Case Study

2005-05-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

So you’ve built your website, you know what keywords
you want to target (i.e. what words your customers are
searching for), and you’re ready to write your
copy. You’ve been told that you should use your
keywords frequently so that you appear in search results
for those words. But what does “frequently”
mean?

How many times should you use your primary keyword?
This case study helps answer that question.

Some background on ”Keyword Density”

In order to understand optimum keyword usage, we first
need to have some way of measuring keyword frequency.
In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, frequency
is actually referred to as density. Keyword density
is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears
on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount
of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words,
and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density
is 5%. So when you hear someone say “keyword density”,
that’s normally what they’re talking about.
(TIP: You can automatically check the keyword
density of your page at LiveKeywordAnalysis.com.)

However, there is another, more complex measure of
keyword density which takes into account the text components
in the HTML of the page (i.e. the meta tags: Title,
Keywords, Alt Text, Description, and Comments). When
using this measure, you don’t just count the words
your visitor sees; you also count the words in your
meta tags. For example, if you have 100 words on your
home page, 10 words in your Title tag, 20 words in your
Description tag, 70 words in your Alt tags, and 10 words
in your Comments tag, your total wordcount for the page
is 100 + 10 + 20 + 70 + 10 = 210. Similarly, when counting
keywords, you don’t just add up the number of times
a visitor will see your keyword, you also count the
number of times that keyword appears in your meta tags.
For example, if your keyword appears 5 times in the
home page copy, 3 times in the Title tag, 5 times in
the Description tag, 30 times in your Alt tags, and
twice in your Comments tag, your total keyword count
is 5 + 3 + 5 + 30 + 2 = 45. So with a total wordcount
of 210 and a keyword count of 45, your keyword density
is 45/210 x 100 = 21%. It is argued that this measure
of keyword density is more relevant as the search engines
measure density in this fashion. (TIP: You can
automatically check the keyword density of your page
using this more complex measure at GoRank.com.)

As you can see, you need to be very aware of which
measure you’re talking about when you’re talking
“keyword density”. But let me reiterate; mostly
when people talk about keyword density, they’re
talking the simple measure.

What is the optimum keyword density

And now down to business… What keyword density
(of either kind) should you be targeting on your website?

There’s a lot of debate surrounding this issue
because the search engine companies don’t disclose
the details of their algorithms (as that would allow
people to abuse the system). Instead, people working
in the SEO world are left to figure it out based on
their experience.

A recent article by respected SEO and Blog expert,
Wayne Hurlbert, (see Keyword
Density: SEO Considerations) suggests that Google
sees pages with a keyword density of greater than 2%
as spam. It was this article which prompted me to analyze
the keyword density of my copywriting website.

CASE STUDY

The Website: This case study analyzes
the website for my advertising copywriting and SEO
copywriting business, Divine Write – http://www.divinewrite.com.
For my primary keyword, my site is now on page 1 of
Google.com (out of approximately 900,000 search results).

Number of pages on site: At the time
of writing, my website contained a total of 53 pages.

Primary keyword phrase: “copywriter”

Average keyword density: Using the
simple measure of keyword density discussed above,
the average keyword density of my copywriting website
is 1.9%. Using the complex measure it’s 4.9%.

Keyword density range: Using the simple
measure, my density ranged from 0.4% to 7.6%. Using
the complex measure it ranged from 1.6% to 17.5%

Some comments on the keyword density figures

The figures and corresponding ranking detailed in
this case study may not be directly relevant to every
site. There’s a lot I don’t know about the
algorithms and there are bound to be other factors
at play which I don’t know about.

With regard to Wayne Hurlbert’s article, it
would seem that he is referring to keyword density
as calculated using the simple method discussed above.

The range figures are noteworthy because they suggest
that you don’t need to be paranoid about having
some pages with a very high density and some with
a very low density.

Conclusion

A simple keyword density of 1.9% can be enough for
a first page ranking in Google.com (assuming you have
enough quality backlinks – see SEO
for CEOs and How
to Top Google by Writing Articles for more information).

Happy SEO writing!

About the Author
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

Search Engine Friendly Design

2005-05-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

Search engine consultants and website designers are often called in at different times to work on a website development project. Rarely do the two ever work together, which is very unfortunate. With this being the case, many search engine marketing consultants have seen their client's rankings plummet without hope after a website redesign. Vise versa, many designers have seen their exceptionally created and beautiful website designs destroyed by an SEO-focused optimization. This does not have to happen!

The ongoing argument between search engine optimizers and website designers has always been focused around one simple question… who serves the greater purpose? The search engine optimizer will argue: what good are great looking, flash-enabled, and graphic-heavy websites if no one will ever find and appreciate them. The website designer will counter with: what good are websites capable of attracting 1,000 new visitors a week if not one visitor sticks around long enough to convert. The fact is that the search engine optimizer and the website designer are both correct and are both equally important in the website development process.

The process is simple. When an Internet searcher enters a keyword or key-phrase into Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, they demand that the search engine provide them with adequate and relevant results. That same Internet searcher, when entering a website, expects certain website characteristics, such as a design and layout that best represents the products or services it provides, an easy-to-use and understandable navigation, and a complete fully functionally website. Nothing less should be expected. So, if both are equally important than where does that leave us… with something I like to call “Search Engine Friendly Design.”

A search engine friendly design is nothing more than a well-balanced combination of both, search engine optimization and professional website design. In addition, a search-engine friendly website should also be in tune to the average visitor. It is very important that every page of the website be designed and written with its visitor's best interest in mind. Let’s face it, if you’re not appealing to your website's average user, than all efforts, including design and promotion, are lost.

A savvy designer, one who knows what search engines are looking for, can design websites without compromising their appearance and usability. Here are a few examples of how:

Text vs. Images - Its common knowledge within the search engine marketing community that search engines are blind to layout and pictures. Often website designers, trying to add creative elements to their website, will implement large graphics and flash files, not realizing that their actions may actually be inhibiting the website's promotion.
Seeing as search engines will most likely be the primary source of any website's traffic, I would highly suggest adding a search engine marketing consultant to your development team, especially during the beginning stages of your website design. As a good search engine marketing consultant already knows, it is very important to develop and maintain a website that has plenty of content, enriched with relevant keywords.

Navigation Menus - Website navigation schemes, such as JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash banners, can really help to create a unique and visually pleasing website design that is sure to help it stand-out amongst all other websites. Unfortunately, these same creative elements also make it extremely difficult, and in some instances impossible, for search engines to properly crawl the website, therefore limiting the website's search engine exposure.
There are, of course, solutions to this that will appease both the website designer and search engine optimizer. As a suggestion, consider using standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting to develop a graphically pleasing navigation menu. Unlike most JavaScript menus, neither standard rollovers nor CSS will "hide" your website's links, allowing search engines to freely crawl and index your websites pages.
If a JavaScript navigation menu is truly needed to attain the desired look and feel of your website, than consider adding text-based links elsewhere on your website's pages, such as the bottom. Bottom navigation schemes consisting of text-based links are becoming very common now-a-days, as they ultimately provide your website's visitors, and search engines, with another source for navigating. Another suggestion would be to develop and allow access to a sitemap containing all of your website's pages.

Flash vs. HTML - Flash is a pain in the sides of all SEO consultants... but it doesn't have to be. It is possible to mix Flash with HTML to create a search engine friendly website that still allows for a rich media experience.
My suggestion for when developing a website using Flash is to create separate pages, those in Flash and the others in HTML. Not only will you be giving your website's visitors a choice of which version he or she would like to view (which most will appreciate), but you will also be giving your website the chance to be indexed and ranked through your HTML versions. A very good compromise if you ask me.

Dynamic Websites - Depending on how your particular system is configured and how your website's dynamic pages are created, the use of dynamic websites can either be a great thing or a very terrible thing. Because dynamic web pages are data-based driven and are created on the fly, they are usually assigned URLs containing very large and strange looking parameters. These parameters, amongst other reasons, are needed in order to sort products and generate a central navigation for your website's visitors. At the same time, these parameters make it very difficult for many search engines to crawl, follow, or index your website's pages.
My suggestion to this problem is to consult with your development team, and your search engine marketing consultant, and have them consider developing your content management system using either ASP (Active Server Pages) or CFM (Cold Fusion). Either one of these "dynamic scripting languages" has the possibility of converting the URL's query string from "?" (which will usually stop a search engine from indexing the page) into "/". This process, and a few others, maybe all that is needed in order to give your dynamically driven web pages the opportunity to be indexed.
In my experience, designers who understand these and other common search engine friendly design issues are perfectly capable of designing around them, without sacrificing their design or future search engine rankings. As long as the designer and search engine optimizer come together in the very beginning, as opposed to after the website has been created, than finding a compromising solution to each of their needs should not be a problem.

Karl Ribas - Search Engine Marketing Consultant

About the Author
I am Karl Ribas, Project Manager at All Web Promotion. I am a search engine marketing specialist and have been developing, maintaining, and successfully ranking websites since 2003. I provide effective SE marketing services to a wide range of businesses, while employing only proven, innovative, and widely accepted techniques.