I never thought that I would care about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but having a blog has made me obsess over it a bit. One of the best tools is by far the Sitemap protocol. Making a sitemap.xml file is very easy especially if you use a generator of some kind, there are many, but I use the WordPress plug-in by Arne Brachhold.

The standard introduced by Google has also been adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com so it's definitely worth your while. It basically describes the pages in your site that you want indexed and there is even a way to let search engines know when your sitemap file has been updated [example link].

The bulk of my traffic comes from Google searches so I've concentrated my efforts there. Before Google will use your sitemap file you have to verify your site by adding in a meta tag in the head of your home page. You can use Google's Webmaster Central to verify your site, manage your sitemap file and get really amazing stats about how your site is doing within the Google index. Webmaster Central used in conjunction with Google Analytics gives me a complete picture of how my site is doing. I've used a lot of analytics tools in my years doing web development, from Omniture, WebSideStrory to WebTrends and Google Analytics is as good or better than any of them and it's free.

If you're trying to figure out how those Google sitelinks are made, it's still a mystery. Although there is no way to make Google add them to your listing, I have to figure that doing everything you can to help Google understand your site can only do good.

For more information about SEO you should check out:
Search Engine Watch.

Flash has always suffered from being a black box to search engines. Even if SWFs were readable by search engines it wouldn’t help because any respectable RIA these days gets its content related data elsewhere. At the very minimum the content is stored in XML file(s) that don’t follow any kind of standard or in a database, both of which lock away your content from search engines. And if that weren’t enough, most Flash applications only have one HTML page and that doesn’t exactly increase your chances of a good ranking, no matter how good your alternate content and meta tags are.

Thankfully there are things like SWFAddress that can really make a difference in the SEO battle. SWFAddress allows you to have independent urls and titles for every page in your Flash site along with providing a mechanism for deep linking. Downloading SWFAddress gets you AS classes for all three flavors, the SWFAddress JavaScript file and a variety of excellent examples.

Combine this with the Sitemap Protocol and now we’re cooking with fire!