Getting Googled ... it doesn't have to hurt.

Google is one of the Internet's biggest search engines and it's purpose is to return to the user the most relevant website for a particular search item.

If you type in, say, NY apartments, and the first thing that comes up is Houston, that's not a good experience. Google wants to keep your business, so it indexes millions of websites by sending out what are called "spiders" that read through the content of a website, follow all of the links so it can read all of the text on all of the different pages and then throw up the most relevant sites when a user types in say, pink elephants.

Herein lies the problem with Flash which search engines see as one giant movie or image and therefore cannot accurately read.

Manhattan-based Posner Advertising created a Flash website that's "spider friendly" and will therefore pop up in search engines when users are looking for AvalonBay apartments. Once you're on the Internet, or Worldwide Web, firms can also track their ranking through such programs as Alexa

Firms such as Posner also conduct optimization campaigns for clients, which basically gets their information to pop up on search engines. There are several ways of doing this. One popular way is to have links to and from your website to other relevant sites. Remember, Google's "spider" will then read your website text (and/or Flash) and then all the others linked to it, therefore increasing its likelihood of getting Googled.

Of course, like everything else, there are ways around this--which explains why you get pink lingerie when your looking for elephants. Some websites allow you to post a link to your website or firms can actually buy links on highly ranked websites and, the third option is, a link exchange, basically, you let me on yours and I'll let you on mine. All of which is designed for search engine optimization.