The Search Engine Strategies Conference was held in New York over most of last week. it is one of the main gatherings of professional search engine strategists, practitioners and academics each year. I was not there but as a web professional I have to keep abreast so felt obliged to plough through at least the main points the

keynote speakers made even though I had a dispiriting sense of deja vu for much of it.

Once again the CEOs of all of the major search engines got on the platform and told us to design for people and we will do well in the search engines. Once more they told us that, no, their bots still can not read and therefore can not index images and no, it is not a good idea to write a site in flash if it is your intention use search engine methods to drive traffic there. Once more they said they were busily penalising those who use underhand methods to try and cheat the search engines into giving them higher rankings.

Simultaneously I read, present tense, on more than one forum the disingenuous statements of graphic design companies telling us what great flash sites they design and how we should all be thinking out of the box. I wasn't aware of being in a box, let alone of restricting my thinking to within one. Of course, we are all aware exactly how much time they spend on finding out how the results of their egotistic actions work against the best interests of their clients. And of course we know only too well that it is the client's choice and not their place to warn of the likely consequences.

This brings me on to the final part of the moan, and into the positive side of what came out of the conference. I have had reason recently to look at many web sites, several of which had, possibly still have, flash and other moving images on their front pages. Several owners and designers told me they were only small parts of the page, linked in rather than with the code where it would put off the search engines, and that it did no harm there. But is that really the point? In what way were those busy images drawing the potential buyers attention to the product or service the site is there to represent? If that is its intention, I have yet to see how it is working. In many cases, it is an unnecessary distraction.

At least one presenter each day talked about topics such as visitor behaviour and how to make a site interesting, relevant and therefore attractive. I amassed a virtual, as it is all in electronic format, bookshelf full of material on these topics. A real treasure trove of a refresher course. Note the context of the word attractive as used in this paragraph. Absolutely nothing to do with pictorial representations, graphic design or visuals. It is, as it has always been, about relevant content and how that content is expressed and broken up into digestible chunks, including using graphics as and only when appropriate. Not only was this message well delivered, there were excellent examples and samples of how to do it and how not to do it. These reminded me of more reference materials and of books in my possession.

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