Seesmic and Search Engine Optimization: my advices

Loic Lemeur, French serial entrepreneur that I often quote in this blog, has posted today an article on his blog where he asks for help in order to optimize Seesmic, his online company, in Google. One of his main mistake was to use a 100% flash version of the website. This is the first advice I can give: Never use 100% flash version while creating your website. Flash might be an advanced technology to create website, it might be pretty, but it is a real handicap while trying to optimize your website. The only people that could use a 100% flash version of their website would be luxury brands, like Gucci or Hermes, that have a great brand equity and don't really need a great exposure on the web.

Google loves text: all its indexation is based on text. It does not analyze video nor pictures. This is why it is important to provide him text in order to help him understand what your website is about.

Anyway, Loic has understood his mistake, and in a great effort of modesty, he is asking his community to help him improve its SEO (which is actually a real "2.0" behavior).

Here would be my main recommandations:
- First you need to pick the main key words you want to optimize: You need to make a research thanks to Google ad, to identify which of the keywords are more seeked by Internet users. For example, let's check if "video community", or "video service" have a high volume of search. Sometimes you think that some keywords perfectly match your website, and you would like people that are seeking them to land on your website, but these keywords have a low volume of search. You need to identify these words that both people search and correspond to your site and focus on them.
-Once you have these words, you need to ad them as much as you can on your website. You need for instance to add them in the title of your site: instead of having "seesmic" in your title, it is far better to have "online video community", if these words are the proper terms to optimize. You also need to add these different words in your meta descriptions, and the pictures of the site.
-Custom all pages titles and meta. In order to have a good Google Pagerank, it is important to customize each pages of the website, and not to have the same page titles for all the pages. Each pages will then be taken into consideration by Google.
- As you have said, Flash is a great issue while trying to optimize your site. Try to give as much text information as possible: give a name and a description to alll your videos and pictures, try to add as much text as you can, tagg the videos and so on.

For such a big company as Seesmic, based on the web, I think they need to seek for an expert, that will help them set up their SEO strategies. But with these simple advices, Seesmic should be able to have a great pagerank.