So today I thought I would share with you a tid bit of info I found from running a MergeRank for a local friend of Merge.

The site is completely Flash based and in the back of my mind I thought they were going to score in the teens or even single digits, but lo and behold they scored a 25.  Now mind you this is still a poor score, but how did they score so high for being a Flash site?

We all know the battle between Apple and Adobe on Flash, but some people might not know about the battle between Flash and the major search engines.  Here is a little background on why all the major search engines look down upon Adobe’s proprietary multimedia behemoth.  Adobe’s Flash is a platform that makes use of graphics, text, video and fancy animations and presents this content to the user in a flash video player.  You may know that YouTube makes great use of this player type and many other sites use it for ads or videos.  Unfortunately, all the major search engines have made it widely known that they cannot or will not crawl this content.  Google made strides toward doing so a few years ago which was a huge step to solving a glaring problem for a website that is developed solely in Flash.  The problem is that when you have your website made in Flash, you have one webpage.  You may have multiple “pages” within your Flash site, but to Google and all the other search engines, you have a one page website that contains Flash content.

If you get down to the nuts and bolts of what Google wants from a website, your answer is content.  Having loads of content ideally means you have loads of pages that Google can index.  Having a one page website goes against what Google would like your site to be.

But what does all this have to do with offline marketing?

One of the factors the search engines use when they rank your website is how many other websites link to you, essentially gauging how popular your website is.  You may have heard me talk about your website’s high school popularity and that is defined by your backlinks.

Having a strong offline marketing campaign and an external online marketing plan helped gain our friends over 3,500 high quality backlinks.  They have many industry authority sites that are linking to them and that is very impressive.

Bottom Line:  Don’t fret if your site only has a small number of pages.  Get out there and use those offline marketing skills to get backlinks.  When you land a great catalog ad campaign or a billboard at a ballpark, make sure you ask for a link to your site.  Odds are they have their own site and are fairly gracious to paying customers.  But more importantly, that link will make a world of difference to your single page website.