« iTunes vs Flash | Main | Selling audience attention »
July 31, 2007
SEO drivers
SEO drivers: Ryan Stewart dissects how the problem of exposing a database to URL-based search engines is extraneous to whether the presentation format is expressed as text: "RIAs are a difficult thing to expose to search engines. Do you want them to index the state of the application? No, you want them to index the content and ideally, for something like a storefront, be able to deep link into that specific item, in 'focus', in your RIA. Silverlight doesn't make that any easier, so people should stop comparing Silverlight and Flash on the grounds of searchability. It doesn't fit in this instance and the whole SEO/RIA problem is something we still need to think about on both sides of the fence." Mike Potter has more. I've been thinking lately of why there seems to be such a strong desire for simple solutions to search problems... I think the answer may be revealed in independent web-development mailing lists, where a job isn't really completed to the customer's satisfaction until you can answer "Why is my site not on the first page of search results?" When combined with the necessary opacity of search engine vendors, there are no clear answers, no obvious ways to succeed. A large, difficult-to-satisfy need means that any simple solution, no matter how outlandish, will naturally find a receptive audience. Seem plausible to you...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at July 31, 2007 10:09 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/8950
Comments
I understand the Flash angle, don't understand the Flex one, nor the Silverlight one.
For example, how does one optimize http://www.transformersmovie.com/ is a different question than how does one optimize Outlook? SEO on a consumer facing website makes sense. SEO on an application does not. Because of the variety of uses for the platform, different developer needs get mushed together, when in reality, they are totally different.
For example, my company builds Internet TV solutions. Our video players are embedded into customer sites as are some of our content management widgets. These elements, however, don't have indexable content. The website surrounding them does. Most of our customers already have a website; they just want to enhance the functionality on that site, ie, add video to it. SEO isn't "our problem"; a lot of the customers will already have web teams, or hire their own SEO consultants.
However, since the dudes who make the Transformers Movie website and I use the same runtime, the questions about it's SEO applicability get lumped, incorrectly, into the same context.
Posted by: JesterXL at July 31, 2007 02:36 PM
Yeah, different problems.
For a movie release, the optimization goal would be to be the #1 result on all search engines for term "transformers movie".
But for an application, you'd never want just a single data record without a whole lot of other context in the query... matching "zucchini" in an agricultural database would be completely different from matching it in a restaurant database, and neither should be on the first page of results on search term "zucchini".
(On the video widget angle, nobody's actually expecting their website to suddenly show up when people search for "transformers" just because they're running a clip, right...? ;-)
jd
Posted by: John Dowdell at July 31, 2007 04:58 PM