Eye on Business | Are you too Flashy?

Good Tuesday evening everyone! This is Jodee Ball, lead website techie, over at JP Ball Photography.Apologies for my late post! I’m a teacher by day and a mother by morning, noon and night. And I live on caffeine.Tonight I’m going to introduce the topic of SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization. If you’ve been in business for long, then you are probably very familiar with this term. If you’re like me, this is one area of my business that could use a little TLC.I’m not an SEO guru. I’m just an inquisitive blogger wanting to improve my SEO ratings and bring in more clients. You too, huh? Join me in learning!My website is the front door to my business. I don’t own a main street studio (sobs) and my studio is nothing fancy that would woo potential clients.  My website must be in tip top shape, appealing to potential clients. They must easily be able to find me when doing a Google search.I recently redesigned my senior site and it’s still a work in progress. I am in the process of adding more content to it. At least, that has been on my tasking list for 3 weeks, so I’m at least heavily thinking and stressing about it.My first website was, I thought, a masterpiece. I had a beautiful really awful  flash slideshow with music and a few bits of information about my new business, myself and my prices. When it was time to renew my site, I decided to do a little research and I started reading that Flash websites aren’t found easily, if at all, via Google’s search engine.Hmmmm...I began to learn the difference between a Flash website (those purty fancy ones) and HTML websites.I learned that I have two sectors to impress... GOOGLE and PEOPLE. Google is no nonsense, likes words, words, words in a framework and people like images, images, images filled with beauty and emotion. See the disconnect?In a nutshell, HTML websites are built on words, keywords and other data that Google will crawl and pickup.  Flash websites are more picture and music based with little words for Google to grab. They also take some time to load and Google “ain’t got no time for that!”I’ll be giving some SEO tips next week. In the meantime, here’s an experiment you can do.Go to Google. Type in your business name. When you see your website, right click on the small green triangle just to the right of your web address (green letters). The word “cached” will pop up. Click on it and you will see the last time Google crawled your site for content. If it has been a long time, this tells you that you need to step up your SEO significantly!We’ll go deeper into this topic next week!Remember to show your love for SSG by retweeting the blog posts!