As reported on TechCrunch and ZDNet, Adobe has created a standardized format for its Flash development suite that will allow search engines to index dynamically generated content, which was not previously possible. What does this mean for the industry? Frankly, it means that “existing and future” Flash sites will be more accessible to search engine crawlers which will result in many previously invisible websites being indexed and ranked in search results. Google is already incorporating the new capabilities into their search platform, and Yahoo! reportedly still “has some work to do.”

This is good news for designers that prefer Flash for its flexibility and animation capabilities. However, it also opens up a whole new series of questions that will have to be explored and tested by the SEO community:

• Will this newly indexable content start out with zero site history? As we know, the age of a domain plays a role in calculating its authority and credibility. If a Flash site has been around for years but is just now becoming “visible” to a crawler, can its age be accurately determined?
• Without a hierarchical markup system, how will crawlers treat text and images of varying importance? For example, in HTML we can use the <h1> and <strong> tags to emphasize particular pieces of content. What is the Flash equivalent, and will those tactics be more or less impactful than their HTML counterparts?
• How will crawlers treat Flash sites that have a properly optimized HTML framework? As an SEO, I know how to create a crawler-friendly HTML version of Flash content to aid with crawler accessibility. Will Google and Yahoo treat sites with both formats differently or prefer one over the other?
• Will sites built entire of Flash be treated differently than HTML sites with Flash components? Good SEO and user experience (accessibility) dictate that Flash should not be used to create an entire site, but rather certain interactive elements within it. Will two sites with similar content be treated differently if one is built entirely in Flash and the other is a Flash element wrapped in standard HTML?
• How will the use of Flash adjust to incorporate deep links? Most purely Flash sites have no unique URLs for each “page” because all of the content exists within one .swf file. Therefore, most inbound links would have to point to the top-level URL, regardless of where the desired content resides within the rich media application. This will help the domain-level rankings but not individual pages.
• Will Flash designers adapt their use of analytics to properly measure the traffic and conversions from newfound organic search traffic? There is a little extra work required to properly track Flash site usage statistics using traditional site analytics packages. I’m guessing relatively few Flash sites have this capability built in, and even fewer are going to retrofit their sites with action tags.
• How will non-text digital assets (images, video, audio, etc) be optimized within Flash? Will the same rules apply, and if so, will digital assets embedded in Flash be more, less, or equally weighted compared to their HTML counterparts?

I’m sure this list of questions will grow over time and many smart, talented SEOs and Flash designers will figure out the answers. It’s certainly a game changer for the industry because it expands the playing field significantly. We are now competing against millions of “new” sites that were once thought of as unfortunate victims of emerging SEO best practices.

All marketers know that their jobs are part art, part science. Some companies lean more towards the analytical science of quantifiable marketing, and others are more comfortable with producing beautiful works of art. Is one necessarily better than the other? Not necessarily, depending on your target audience and your business objectives.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the marketing industry is heading down the path of producing and analyzing quantifiable metrics for as many aspects of a campaign as possible, similar to the financial industry’s transition in the 1970’s:

“There is every reason to believe marketing will go through a similar transition, but the principles of marketing–which are around storytelling, entertainment, targeting and selling–will be augmented by analytical tools,” Schmidt said.

This sounds good on paper. There are very few marketers who want to know less about how well their campaigns are working. But it is easy to fall victim to the hype and start thinking that all of our analytical problems will be solved by throwing more CPU cycles and clever code at the problem.

From my days as a Media Planner at a very analytical advertising agency and a Web Marketing Manager a very analytical automotive retailer, I can tell you that the current crop of advertising metrics and analytics packages are nowhere near where they need to be to replace a human being’s experience and strategic capabilities. As Schmidt said, analytical tools will only augment the principles of marketing, not replace them.

The Holy Grail of Marketing Analytics (doesn’t exist)

To really satisfy all the needs of all marketers, a full-fledged analytical marketing program would have to satisfy my newly-created (and partly tongue-in-cheek) tenets of the “Golden Rectangle“; balance the aesthetically pleasing with mathematical accountability.

Tenets of the Golden Rectangle of Marketing

1. Analytical marketers must be able to correlate sales to marketing initiatives. Every sale must be attributed to one or more marketing channels for a period of time. This includes online-to-offline conversions and purchase decisions that involve multiple decision makers and/or long periods of time.
2. Analytical marketers must take all known (and unknown) variables into account when drawing conclusions. This includes macroeconomic factors, competitive strategies, seasonality, media mix, creative execution, brand recognition, solar flares, word of mouth, personal beliefs, and customer’s internal thought processes among other things.
3. Analytical marketers must drive real-time decisions about optimizing across every marketing campaign a client is running, regardless of medium. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it doesn’t tell advertisers what to do with their next marketing dollar when the variables change.
4. Analytical marketers need to understand that some of the success of an advertising campaign will always depend on the human input, whether it is creative or strategic. Machines won’t be able to replicate those traits for a long time to come.

So while it’s great to think that one day all marketing will be entirely analytical and based on some algorithm somewhere in the computing cloud, we have to remember that we live and work in the real world of human wants, needs, desires, psychology, sociology and physiology. If Google can learn to manipulate those variables, they may very well create the next golden rectangle. Until then, people can still serve as the cogs in the marketing wheel.

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is shaping up to be one of the season’s most anticipated spectator sports for the internet marketing community. Not only is it a great educational opportunity for the next generation of online marketing professionals, but it will help small and medium sized businesses learn more about utilizing Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as part of their regular marketing mix. Google will undoubtedly come out ahead in the long run as a result of increased awareness and trials of its primary revenue generating operation. It’s a classic win-win-win.

I have already been approached by some friends and relatives in business school that are new to Adwords and PPC consulting that are looking for advice on how to pick the best small-to-medium sized business to partner with. This may be one of the more important decisions they will make, since their level of interaction with their “clients” will largely determine how successful the student “consultants” can be.

That being said, I would consider the following when choosing a business to partner with:

• Flexibility: Choose a company that is open to making changes to their website quickly. Some small-to-medium companies don’t have the resources in-house to make rapid changes. This will be important when you have to ask them to add tracking code to the site and/or update various components of their landing pages and conversion pages to improve performance.
• Short Purchase Cycle: You will want a company that has a quick turnaround time for conversion events. Think spontaneous purchases or conversions. Don’t go after car dealers, mortgage companies, real estate brokers or insurance companies since those types of transactions can take weeks or months to complete and you will only have 3 weeks. Find something easy. Look for sites that have a lot of opportunities for visitors to turn into customers (e-commerce sites, sites that offer free downloads, sites that try to generate leads for the company). This will give you a lot of conversion data from which you can quickly make decisions about how to optimize your campaign for better-performing keywords, ad text and CPC bids.
• Online and Offline Metrics: If you want to go after the holy grail of internet marketing, take the conversion tracking one step farther and try to find a business where you can track customers that go offline to make a purchase. The majority of businesses sell their products or services offline. They don’t have shopping carts on their websites that allow them to easily track conversions automatically. The challenge for many businesses is to determine which part(s) of their marketing programs are actually generating a positive return on investment (ROI). Paid search is a very quantifiable marketing tool but if you can’t measure its contribution to an actual sale, you can’t determine if it is more or less effective than any other marketing channel.
• Low-to-Moderate Competition: Certain industries are more exposed to internet marketing than others. For example, your local small business might be competing against much larger, more sophisticated national or international organizations with dedicated search engine marketing teams. Choose wisely. Look for companies that operate within a less competitive environment where you can stand out a little more. Travel, insurance, automotive and healthcare are good examples of highly competitive industries. Not to mention that industries (and keywords) with more competition will generally have higher minimum Cost-Per-Clicks, meaning you won’t be able to afford large enough quantities of clicks to make any statistically significant findings.
• Strong Demand: Choose a company or industry that receives enough searches to allow you to collect a significant data sample within the allotted time frame. “Llama farmers in Ann Arbor, MI” might not generate enough impressions and clicks to give you any clear insights about whether your strategies and tactics are working or not.

You may have some trouble finding a willing company that meets all of these criteria, but the more of them you can satisfy, the better chance you will have of generating some valid results within the 3-week contest window.

Good luck

Anybody with five minutes and a credit card can set up Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts and start driving traffic to their site. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should open your wallet without taking some measures to optimize your site for better Quality Scores and conversions. As with most things in life (and SEM), an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Let’s take a step back for a minute. A responsible (and successful) marketer tries to maximize ROI, that’s a given. Yet, I see so many sites on a daily basis that are throwing away money by trying to drive PPC traffic to landing pages and sites that are not optimized for high Quality Scores and conversions. Why should landing page optimization be your first step when setting up a PPC campaign? Poorly optimized landing pages usually result in:

• Higher required minimum bids (Costs Per Click or CPC) for your targeted keywords. You spend more money per click than you should.
• Higher (worse) average positions - Your ads are less likely to be noticed and clicked on on a search engine results page even though you may be paying as much or more per click as those listed above you.
• Higher Cost Per Conversion (CPA) - Lower conversion rates raise your CPA.
• Lower Click Through Rates (CTR)

What can be done? For starters, make sure your landing page and site are accessible to search engine crawlers. Check the following off your list:

• Robots.txt and/or meta “robots” tags - Are you inadvertently prohibiting search engines from crawling and indexing your content?
• Site navigation structure - Is your site navigation based on AJAX, Flash, or JavaScript? If so, it’s not visible to search engines and they won’t be able to follow links between pages.
• Site content structure - Is your site’s content coded or wrapped in AJAX, Flash, or JavaScript? Again, content within these structures are invisible to search engines and may as well not even exist.

Once you’ve taken care of these issues, it’s time to focus on the site content itself. Pick your targeted keywords. Make each landing page’s content relevant to the targeted keywords you’ve selected for each page. Build your credibility and authority by getting links from other reputable sites to yours. Add useful, unique and well-written content and features that others will find interesting.

Experiment with various landing page designs and conversion funnels. There is no “magic bullet” or “guaranteed conversion” but you can keep testing and refining your landing pages to try to wring out a few more percentage points in your conversion rate. Remember, it’s usually easier to grow your sales by converting a larger percentage of your existing visitors than it is to get more qualified visitors through the front door.

Crude as they are, these diagrams should suffice for you visual learners out there.

PPC without SEO and landing page optimization leaves money on the table

PPC with SEO and landing page optimization converts more visitors to customers

Of course, this is not just a one-time event. This is the bare minimum necessary to run an efficient PPC campaign. Keep these best practices in mind and don’t be afraid to try everything you can think of to keep the optimization cycle going. By focusing a little more on your landing pages, you’ll not only run more efficient PPC campaigns but you will also convert more of your visitors to customers. Tell me that isn’t worth a little extra time up front planning your end-to-end online marketing strategies.

I’m not ashamed to admit I have one reality show weakness. You can have your American Idol, your Dancing With The Stars and your So You Think You Can Dance, but don’t mess with my America’s Got Talent. Sure, all four shows get good ratings (for summer programming) and draw very talented competitors, but I am getting tired of their formulaic approach to competition. We all like watching the tragically untalented singers, dancers, jugglers, magicians and mimes. If you’re like me, you can relate more to them than to the eventual winners. Keep those videos rolling. We can also appreciate the previously undiscovered talent that eventually emerge to make the final rounds.

What gets me is that the producers feel like they can (and should) stretch 30 minutes of content into a 2-hour season finale, all in the name of selling more ads. They know they have their audience hooked, and cramming a few more sponsor vignettes or commercial breaks won’t hurt anybody, right? Wrong. How many times have you heard a variation of this common lead-in, “And the winner of this year’s (insert show name here) competition is……..(pregnant pause)……..coming up after the break.”? You know it’s coming, the studio audience knows it’s coming and the producers wisely cut to commercial before the audience’s groans reach the mics.

The reason I bring this up is simple. TV is a passive medium. Sitting through another 3-minute commercial break isn’t going to actually kill anybody, but stringing together several in the last 15 minutes of a reality show finale doesn’t help cement a relationship with a particular viewer either. Personally I use the breaks to hit the head, check email, grab a snack or take the dog out. The sad thing is, desperate advertisers know this but continue to pump money into a medium that fails to reach audiences like it used to. I’m not saying TV advertising isn’t effective anymore, it’s just becoming less so.

Online, it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s an active medium. People expect instant gratification and aren’t afraid to click away to find what they want elsewhere. A site that introduces too many roadblocks before a conversion is going to lose visitors to the competition. People visit your site with a goal in mind. Many times, that goal is to give you their money. Don’t do anything foolish like put unnecessary ads, shopping cart pages or surveys in their path. Eliminate or consolidate as much “stuff” as possible and your customers will reward you.

TV producers haven’t figured this out yet. Stuffing more ads into a program might help them make up for their smaller audience size, but in most cases they are only creating more dissatisfied viewers that will significantly cut their TV consumption once they get a taste of instant gratification on the web.