Julia Angwin wrote a great article in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, about SERPs (search engine position ranking) and controlling your reputation online. She writes that among the top spots result in the search results for her name has been an (in her opinion dissatisfying) article she wrote four years ago.

Since he was about to publish her new book and wanted to make this unflatering article disappear from the the Top 10 of her SERPs, she explored various options how to achieve that. Her insights mentioned in this piece are part of ‘SEO 101′ and illustrate the Do’s and Don’ts when trying to control your online reputation (since Google is the dominant search engine in the U.S. and most other markets, she’s focusses her story on the ‘Big G’).

These are my favorite six takeaways from Angwin’s article:

1. It’s extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results. Persue other others. Only if you can prove that another site has stolen your social security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, the search company might consider to remove the offending data. In that case it’s still recommended that you contact the owner of that site directly.

2. You should take control of your own web presence. Create original content that is compelling to readers and can be easily accessed by search engines – and you’re in the right direction to be in charge of your reputation online.

3. Develop a linking strategy. Get incoming links from relevant and authoritative and websites. (In Angwin’s case, this certainly paid off.)

4. Make search result with the annoying content disappear with your social media efforts. Increase your online visibility by creating accounts at social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us, Furl, Stumble Upon), social networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Talk about your expertise, share insights, thoughts, web finds and other links with others.

5. It’s the crawlability, stupid! A beautiful website with tons of stunning pictures doesn’t do the trick. You need high-quality content which can be easily be crawled by the major search engines.

6. Don’t forget the meta information on your site. You know, texts like the “title tag,” which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine. Often forgotten by noobs, but crucial.

7. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Even if you think that you did a great SEO job, your work is never done. Among many reasons: the search engine constantly update their algorithms, other web content than texts is becoming more and more important (videos, music, podcasts, etc.), your competitors (who are trying to grab the top spots of the same keyword like you) never sleep.

Do you have other suggestions on how to get control of your own SERPs? Leave a comment!

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Google Analytics is currently my favorite web analysis tool. If you not familiar with it yet, I recommend to check it out.

In order to learn more about it, you can go to YouTube and watch a couple of the video tutorials. To start, Google has a great introduction for getting familiar with the interface of Google Analytics:

Great additional tips, info and add-ons:

- There is a great primer on Newsvine how you can set it up in three steps.

- In a great post on Top Rank Blog Thomas McMahon highlights five lesser know Google Analytics features.

- Daily Blog Tip mentions 5 great Google Analytics reports for bloggers.

- Wilson Web lists 10 tips for getting better data from Google Analytics.

- In case you have an online business, I recommend to read the post “Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking: Installation and Setup” by Analytics Talk.

- Very informative also is the post “Flash Tracking” by A-SFUG.

- Needless to say that it’s always worth to check out the Google Analytics blog for news and updates.

- For all the Wordpress bloggers: I recommend to install the Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress. Its interface is very nice, and the fine grained stats and AdSense integration make it a particularly powerful tool.

I will write more about Google Analytics and other web traffic analysis tools. Come back and check for more!

I have to admit. I am not the biggest fan of optimizing Flash websites. There are tons of blog posts which have written extensively how to SEO Flash. We all know the reasons: The search engines don’t know how to crawl these kind of sites, they eat up too much bandwidth, they have a slow load time, they’re CPU heavy etc.

From today there will be less headaches for SEOs and more love for Flash – supposedly. Google and Yahoo announced that they will be able to crawl Flash websites – thanks to Adobe. Apparently the software company has created a special Flash player which will aid the search engine in crawling the web content.

The Google webmaster blog has a great Q&A regarding the improvements. A quick summary:

• Better indexing of textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
• All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. The words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
• Images (and text in images) will not be recognized and indexed.
• Flash content on website will be automatically indexed. If webmaster prefer Google to ignore their less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, they should consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to the search engines.
• Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript.
• Google currently does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by Flash files of a website.
• Currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages.

Mmmm. Interesting. How was the reaction of the blogosphere? Huge. According to Trendpedia there were around 7000 posts published about this topic within the last 24 hours. The chart looks quite impressive:

There have been quite a lot of doubts and critical voices out there about this news.

Mathew Ingram writes in his great blog post titled “News Flash: Flash Websites Still Suck”:

I also have to wonder whether the ability to search through Flash files is going to be that great for websites, since the main thing that gets you higher in Google search results is the number (and quality) of links that you have to your content. (…) But the biggest fly in the ointment for me is the simple fact that most Flash websites are — not to put too fine a point on it — crap.

Techcrunch weighs in:

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim adds:

Google just destroyed the web. (…) Until (the search engine) can demonstrate that its Flash crawling capabilities are equal to its HTML crawling, you risk building a site that, while indexable, is not as “optimized” as its simple HTML cousin.

And Lisa Barone from the Bruce Clay Blog doesn’t spare with criticism:

Flash Web sites are evil. (…) They’re a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. (…) My SEO advice: Stick with creating HTML-based Web sites that users will want to interact with.

What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization Professsionals?

Search Engine Land has a great summary:

Can SEOs now remove the “review Flash implementation” line from their checklists? Probably not. However, it should be easier for SEOs to work with Flash-based sites going forward. SEOs should keep in mind that these new algorithms don’t take into account any meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file and, for now, Google’s cache won’t show a representation of the extracted text so site owners can’t verify what is actually being crawled by viewing the cached copy.

Plus:

If you really HAVE to use Flash – read Jonathan Hochman’s useful article ‘How to SEO Flash’ and SEO Book’s great post ‘How to Flash sites rank well‘, among others. And get the 117 design guidelines for Flash usability by usability guru Jakob Nielson. It costs $60 – but it’s worth it.

I have to admit. I am not the biggest fan of optimizing Flash websites. There are tons of blog posts which have written extensively how to SEO Flash. We all know the reasons: The search engines don’t know how to crawl these kind of sites, they eat up too much bandwidth, they have a slow load time, they’re CPU heavy etc.

From today there will be less headaches for SEOs and more love for Flash – supposedly. Google and Yahoo announced that they will be able to crawl Flash websites – thanks to Adobe. Apparently the software company has created a special Flash player which will aid the search engine in crawling the web content.

The Google webmaster blog has a great Q&A regarding the improvements. A quick summary:

• Better indexing of textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
• All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. The words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
• Images (and text in images) will not be recognized and indexed.
• Flash content on website will be automatically indexed. If webmaster prefer Google to ignore their less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, they should consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to the search engines.
• Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript.
• Google currently does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by Flash files of a website.
• Currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages.

Mmmm. Interesting. How was the reaction of the blogosphere? Huge. According to Trendpedia there were around 7000 posts published about this topic within the last 24 hours. The chart looks quite impressive:

There have been quite a lot of doubts and critical voices out there in the blogosphere about this news.

Mathew Ingram writes in his great blog post titled “News Flash: Flash Websites Still Suck”:

I also have to wonder whether the ability to search through Flash files is going to be that great for websites, since the main thing that gets you higher in Google search results is the number (and quality) of links that you have to your content. (…) But the biggest fly in the ointment for me is the simple fact that most Flash websites are — not to put too fine a point on it — crap.

Techcrunch weighs in:

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim adds:

Google just destroyed the web. (…) Until (the search engine) can demonstrate that its Flash crawling capabilities are equal to its HTML crawling, you risk building a site that, while indexable, is not as “optimized” as its simple HTML cousin.

And Lisa Barone from the Bruce Clay Blog doesn’t spare with criticism:

Flash Web sites are evil. (…) They’re a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. (…) My SEO advice: Stick with creating HTML-based Web sites that users will want to interact with.

What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization Professsionals?

Search Engine Land has a great summary:

Can SEOs now remove the “review Flash implementation” line from their checklists? Probably not. However, it should be easier for SEOs to work with Flash-based sites going forward. SEOs should keep in mind that these new algorithms don’t take into account any meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file and, for now, Google’s cache won’t show a representation of the extracted text so site owners can’t verify what is actually being crawled by viewing the cached copy.

Plus:

If you really HAVE to use Flash – read Jonathan Hochman’s useful article ‘How to SEO Flash’ and SEO Book’s great post ‘How to Flash sites rank well‘, among others. And get the 117 design guidelines for Flash usability by usability guru Jakob Nielson. It costs $60 – but it’s worth it.