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Thanks Winooski, of course you're right and I should have been clearer, but this is the Back to Basics column and far too many websites are developed by people without a clear understanding of SEO and this is a valid comment for the purposes of basic SEO.
Alt tags on images are open to abuse and so carry little importance compared to the anchor text in text links. Flash links can be followed but very, very few Flash developers bother with an SE-friendly implementation of Flash.
Keeping things simple means using text links (as well as images & Flash if necessary) and not relying on Flash or image alt tags to facilitate relevancy and crawling, and this column is all about keeping things simple...
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@ jaybong - Again, you are correct on the image issue and when I refer to submitting to search engines, I'm talking about the various webmaster tools programs that provide invaluable feedback to SEO's, e.g. Google Webmaster Tools.
This article was never intended for an audience of experts and if you guys get your kicks nit-picking holes from a position of more knowledge rather than helping people to understand this difficult subject then more power to you. Yes, the article needs more clarification and had I known it would be submitted to this column then I would have provided it. At the end of the day the basic (and I stress the word basic) information here is good sound advice to people learning SEO and that is the spirit in which it was meant to be read.
Apologies for the last post, in mitigation I've recently been 'blessed' with a new baby ;-) and am suffering from serious lack of sleep - you caught me at a bad time. Am now dosed up on caffeine and feeling more reasonable...
I would like to stress that this article was originally intended for customers of Kellysearch in the UK who, in many cases, have heard of SEO but are not familiar with what it means. I thought Vanessa Fox's article on Relevance, Discoverability and Crawlability to be great way to summarise the founding principles of SEO and so wrote this to go out to our customers in the hope that we could engage with them and help them understand why we do what we do as well as how they can improve their sites. It was never intended as a comprehensive guide and quite how it got into SEL I'm not sure.
The piece is over a year old and has suffered many edits at the hands of well-meaning PR companies, hence for example the lack of clarity over the SE submission. I appreciate the feedback and am aware of the article's limitations - please do add clarification where required.
@galendeyoung - Disclaimer: I work for Kellysearch, but I really do agree with JeffC. This is a deeply flawed way to build a list of B2B search engines. Quite frankly I couldn't care less if we don't rank well for "B2B Search Engine" since none of our target market are ever going to search for us in those terms.
If you want to build the list of major B2B search engines then I would suggest a different methodology, such as assessing relative strengths for key B2B marketplace keywords. As JeffC suggests, try searching for "tyre balancing machines" as our users would...
Another piece of the jigsaw can come from your logfiles & analytics. Resolving the IP addresses of visitors, or using a tool with a 3rd party IP database (e.g. Google Analytics, the report is called Network Location, for some reason) you can often resolve visiting IP addresses to familiar company names. Sure, there'll be a lot of ISP's in there, but there will also be some names you regonise - 'oh so that's where they found us'.
And for post-graduate offline conversion tracking, in Japan they often use Quick Response codes - http://www.searchat.co.uk/index.php/technology/a-solution-to-measuring-offline-conversions/
Nice linkbait title. Content, alas, same old same old.
Still, you got my click...
Unfortunately, pretty pictures do not a good web analytics program make (although they certainly do help). Analytics should lead to actionable insights - what am I going to do with this data? Which is why the ability to track conversions over time is critical and real time data is, in the vast majority of occasions, nowhere near as important.
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