I know this is somewhat old news but Joe Kennedy CEO of Pandora, Peter Chou CEO of HTC, Diane Greene Founder of VMWare and Brad Garlinghouse President of Consumer Apps at AOL. What a great line up, loved this event last year. Has anyone else been to Cyberposium at HBS? The theme is battle of the platforms which is very fitting.

Seems to be very little changes at all for SEO for most keyphrases.

Key Take Aways:
1. SEO isn’t Dead, but search behavior is changing.
2. Google Adwords CTR will go up, and impressions will go down

On a side note: Facebook changed how impressions were calculated as well around the same time Instant came out which also is going to lead to an increased CPM cost / CTR for advertisers. Did anyone else notice this or have any thoughts why they both decided to announce this?

When I first came to the Syracuse Technology Garden I was a fresh college graduate and I was determined not to ever have to write another resume in my lifetime. As I depart the Tech Garden I am certain that I’ll be only reading resumes from now on. The tremendous support provided from the staff specifically Lynn Hughes, Paul Brooks and Nasir Ali certainly contributed to my growth of 164% month over month profit. Being able to bounce ideas off the brilliant Brand-Yourself team and other companies was validating and a great learning experience. I will be missing all things Tech Garden and will always remember the vital early stage assistance it provided to my business. I encourage anyone looking for a great place to grow to check out the Syracuse Technology Garden.

Some of the most interesting tidbits were the logo design websites:
http://logotournament.com/
http://99designs.com/

Another cool tidbit Ross shared was an upcoming design plugin for WordPress that will allow easy wordpress multivariate testing which is very hard to do with WordPress right now.

I would make the smaller elements easy to fit into an HTML layout. This would be an easy fix to make the site load okay if someone doesn’t have flash installed/has a slow computer for the sake of user experience. Ideally there should be a script that detects if flash is present and if not it would show an HTML/Javascript version (http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/detection.htm). JQuery is a fantastic Javascript library that can mimic many of the fancy flash elements as well and should be checked out. However this is my hard SEO/User Experience perspective and if you just want to know how to index your flash for SEO purposes see below.

To make content/flash indexation possible by Google for SEO purposes you need to do the following:

• Use external XML or text files. XML offers search engines a structured and semantic format for indexing site content. And it makes it easier to implement multi-language versions of an application. By keeping your content layer separate from your presentation layer you’ll have a better overall application.
• Create Unique URLs for Important Sections. “Creating unique URLs for important sections of your SWF file, based on the keywords for which you want to optimize, will help search engines navigate into your SWF application and provide targeted results for the most relevant content,” wrote SEO expert Damien Bianchi, in a March 2009 article. To create these unique links, you may want to employ SWFAddress or UrlKit.
• Use the HTML noscript Tag. It can be a good idea to put important site or application content in side of HTML noscript tags, which effectively puts your content into a search engine spider’s favorite language. If you are using external XML, files, you can even load the content dynamically on the server-side.
• Use XSL When Feasible. XSL can define XML formatting and presentation, so you can use it to single XML source to control both Flash content and HTML content, like navigation. You’ll make the entire site’s content searchable and you will be using an effective site development strategy.

Source:
http://www.getelastic.com/seo-for-flash/

Other resources for Flash indexation and Flash SEO:
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml
http://www.flashnseo.com/
http://www.reelseo.com/swfobject-video-seo-2/
http://www.webzo.org/tutorials/seo/flash-optimization.php

I like that the data will be more open — once Yahoo! is dead I will have a hard time analyzing links and Google doesn’t really open that data up fully. This could be a great source of data. However I don’t know if the masses will take it on and be able to figure it out quickly. However it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have another viable search engine to work with considering there are only really 2 now. I’m sure those slashtags can be ‘gamed’ — wonder if people who spend XX,XXX/day on advertising would get a slashtag?