I just completed the design and build of the hosting side of the operation for Teacup In a Storm and now have begun the promotion side of things. So this week my focus for research has been mainly driven by figuring out the best serach optimisation techniques, however since this would have been a little dry a few Flash remoting links as well.

1. The first site I stumbled across was High Rankings. In a newsletter I learned a few things:
   1. while search engines automatically spider your site, they are a bit slow to do that. From memory Google only indexes a couple of pages a day and even then it still takes a while for those new indexed pages to be included in the systems indexes as they are updated only so often (quite frequently I might add). So what about newer content, the trick here is to include such content on the main (home) page and to also have an up to date site map.
   2. another point to take away from the article is that while you may submit your site using their tools, there are also options to pay for your site to be indexed. Most of us work on a budget so the pay option is not always appropriate. So you can still submit your link, but with the understanding that paying customers get priority. This means that it could just that little longer for your site to be indexed in full
2. A further site worth mentioning is Traffick. There a read an article on meta tags and learned that Google doesn’t use them, instead google goes through the page and grabs the content to index. Some consultants believe that it can’t hurt to include the meta tags, but the article firmly believes that they are thing of the past. For the time being though I’ll stick to including them.
3. Back to High Rankings though, another article, talks about how it is important to make your meta tags equivalent to what’s displayed on the page. The previous bullet point, did say that meta tags are kind of obsolete and the page content is king. Well it turns out that many spiders to a mix of the both and analyse/compare the content and the tags. If the two aren’t in sink, then it will use the page content, focusing on words that appear more than once or that appear in page headers to determine the page ranking.
4. So we are looking at a mix between Meta Tags and Content. Now how do we ensure that our keyowrds will work. The first thing this article suggests, is to figure out what keywords are being used. Word Tracker is a tool that allows you to test your keywords against their database of frequently searcged for terms, thus giving you an indication of popular keywords for a specific topic.
5. The following are a few useful links for flash remoting, the most useful relates to debugging flash remoting connections.
6. Another one on determing the connection gateway.
7. Meet the makers has an interview with the co-founder of ColdFusion, Jeremy Allaire. Pretty insightful. It also has a link to his blog.
8. Funny how some things come in twos. The interview with J Allaire had a reference to Vannevar Bush and so did the next one in the web reference news letter. Haven’t had a chance to read the paper he wrote yet, but here it is for posterity and one of those moments where there is nothing else to do.
9. Search Engine watch has another article on optimising Flash for searching.
10. Over at Design matters, there are series of articles on white space, fonts, colour and Text alignement.