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3 ways of Search engines indexing Flash websites.Search engine indexing and Flash websites.
Three methods of getting a complete flash website indexed by search engines .

Search engine indexing and Flash websites.Three methods of getting a complete flash website indexed by search engines .Homepage is the most important page for any website and some people want this page to look very dynamic and highly attractive and flashy as well . The problem with this type of a homepage is that a complete flash page is not indexed by search engines . Homepage is the “gateway” to the rest of the website . A search engine will enter from this gate to find the rest of your website . But if it is not able to enter , then how do you get your website indexed by search engines ?

As a website designer , I often get requests to develop flash websites . These websites are not just websites with flash embedded in them but are completely in flash . Meaning all the links , all the text presented in flash on the homepage of a website .
When you will visit my website , you will see that I also have a fair understanding of search engines as well . This brings trouble when a client sees this . They want me to get their “Complete flash” website indexed by google . Is that possible ? Yes .

How do I do this ?

There are three methods of getting a flash website indexed by google , msn and yahoo . Using these methods , you can get a flash website indexed by all the three major search engines .

Method 1 .
This is the easiest but generally clients do not like this method as it requires the website to display a simple text link to the site map outside the flash .
I generally talk to my clients and often am successful in convincing them to display a simple html link to their sitemap from the bottom of the homepage . The problem is that most clients do not agree on displaying a link outside the flash .
A sitemap is a html page that holds links to all the other pages in the website . One can add a site search engine to this page and organise the page as well . An example of a very old sitemap that represents the above description is at http://www.vspacelab.com/search-engine-optimization.htm .
That is only an example and the website has shifted to a new location .

Method 2 .
This is a little difficult . Search engines are constantly indexing the web . In this process they find new URL’s on an existing old website and index them . One can get a link to a secondary page from such an old indexed website . The link could be to products page , services page , article or any other page that holds links to the rest of the website . The difficulty in this method is that is very difficult to get a link to an “internal page” from another webmaster .
One can also get a link from a blog . Don’t just go an “spam” other’s blog with your link . They might even

also block you from posting again .
You can get links from free web directories but most do not accept internal pages . There are very few who do and some also have a “nofollow” tag in the “rel” attribute which does not solve our purpose .

Method 3
This might sound a little weird but it works . Frames as we know are also not indexed by search engines but the text and links in “NOFRAME” tag do get indexed . Here we will use the frames and the NOFRAME tag to get our Flash website indexed . Here’s how .
First instead of a simple HTML page , make three pages .
Page 1 - Master Frame .( index.html)
Page2 - Flash page . (anyname.html)
Page 3- Blank page with nothing . ( anyname2.html)

Now divide the Master frame in two rows of size 99% and 1% .
Call the flash page ( index.html) in the 99% frame area . Call the blank page in the small 1% frame area .
Now the main page ( index.html ) displays the flash and only the flash . The small area at the bottom is almost invisible and displays nothing . You can fill the blank page with the color of the flash to create a syncronising effect .
The frames should have a Frameborder=”0″ attribute preventing the border from getting displayed .
Don’t forget to add proper text and a link to sitemap in the “NOFRAME” TAG . The search engine will follow the “NOFRAME” tag text and the link in it . You can have a nice search engine friendly article written in that area . The article is visible to only search engines and is completely invisible to browsers . Search engines will index the text and the links in the article as good as they index other regular webpages .

In addition to this , you should also add meta tags to your main page ( index.html) . Meta tags specially “http-equiv=Description” is still acceptted by many search engines including MSn search . They have it mentioned on their webmaster help page . There is a meta tag generator and a small meta tag tutorial at http://www.vspacelab.com/search-engine-optimization.htm .

Feel free to contact me for any help on the frames at http://www.vspacelab.com/search-engine-optimization.htm .

About the Author

S-jeet is a website designer offers html editor that has reduced website design time to less than 50%.For a short time offers free SEO guide,affiliate guide,marketting guide,200 templets,free updates and more with the editor.Get your copy now at http://www.vspacelab.com/search-engine-optimization.htm .

Doorway Pages: the fact

Traditional Doorway Pages are web pages that have been created for the sole purpose of ranking highly in the search results for one or two search terms, and are not normally an integral part of the website. If search engines didn’t exist, neither would doorway pages.

Some search engine optimizers complain that doorway pages clutter up the search results and, therefore, devalue them for surfers. That view is not without a factual basis, but only in the past. It used to be true that a site could dominate the top results with doorway pages, but that was a failing of the search engines. It used to be possible for site to have 5 or more doorway pages in the top 10 results, and sometimes it was much worse. For instance, when localized AltaVista’s first appeared, some sites’ doorway pages would occupy the top 30, 50 and even more results.

AltaVista cleaned up their act and good search engines don’t display more than two pages from the same site in the search results for a given search term. So doorway pages from a single site cannot clutter up the results. They can fill the top rankings, of course, but not all from the same site. Some people claim that this is cluttering up and devaluing the results for surfers by reducing the relevancy of the results, but they really aren’t thinking straight. What difference does it make if a site’s doorway page or content page occupies a top ranking? None. A relevant page from the site is listed; that’s all. It doesn’t devalue the results in any way. Let me give a practical example.

A hotels site offers hotel reservations in a hundreds of cities across the world. They decide to promote each location in the search engines and pick on the search term, ” hotels”, where is replaced by each city in which they have a hotel; e.g. New York hotels, San Francisco hotels, Florida hotels, etc. If they include cities and states, and do it for several countries, there will thousands of variations of the same search term. So they make a doorway page for each of the thousands of variations.

Let’s say that every doorway page is successful, and makes it into the top 10 rankings for its search term. So now the first page of search results for “New York hotels” contains the ‘new york hotels’ doorway page, and the first page of search results for the thousands of phrase variations also contain a new doorway page.

Let’s go even further and let’s say that another 9 hotels sites do the very same thing, and with equal success. Now we have all the top 10 rankings for each search term occupied by doorway pages, one from each site.

Does this clutter up the rankings? Has it devalued them by making them less relevant? Of course not. Each set of search results contains links to very relevant sites. Click any one of the results and you’ll go to a site that offers exactly what you are looking for. You’re happy.

So where’s the problem? Actually, there isn’t a problem but some pseudo search engine optimizers invent problems because they are unable to compete with real search engine optimization, and some search engines invent problems because they want to index the ‘natural’ web and not a web that has been modified because they exist. That’s something they can never have, of course, because as long as search engines display their results in the present form (10 at a time), website owners will always try to ensure that their websites are displayed at the top of the relevant results - where they belong.

Caution

I have shown there there is nothing at all wrong with doorway pages either for surfers or for the engines but, because search engines don’t want pages that are not created as genuine content pages, sites using doorway pages can be penalized if found. The biggest risk is associated with auto-generated cookie-cutters; i.e. doorway pages that are all identical except for their target search terms. They are not difficult for search engines to spot automatically, and I advise against using them.

Can Meta tags such as the keyword tag bring high rankings to my site?

If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up.
Now that we’ve covered the all-important title tag and meta description tag, it’s time to move on to the very misunderstood and abused meta tag, the meta keyword tag.

Everyone knows that to obtain high search engine rankings all you have to do is put the keywords that you want to rank high with into your meta tags, right? Not even close! If it were that simple, I’d certainly be out of work. How many of you reading this column have obsessed over meta tags such as the keyword tag? How many of you have tried putting every relevant keyword you could think of into this meta tag, only to have your site continue to be nearly invisible in the search engines? How many of you couldn’t decide if you should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No commas? ALL CAPS? Plurals?

What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?

This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description tags in the section of your pages’ HTML code, like this:

If this meta tag were a child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in the prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), meta keyword tags were a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the engines’ databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be important on a site.

However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword “sex,” for instance, they’d put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don’t quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.

Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.

Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?

Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won’t hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients’ Web sites, but don’t bother with them on my own sites.

What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?

First let’s recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever created):

Choose your relevant keywords.

Write the site’s content based on these keywords.

Create a title tag using the same keywords.

Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.
Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.

I usually begin putting the keywords I used in the title of my page in the meta keyword tag. The first words in any tag are assumed to be given more weight, so these are most important. Then I go through each paragraph of text on the page and take any important phrases that might be used in the copy and paste them into the meta keyword tag. I usually separate the phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a personal preference. Using no commas at all in this tag is basically the same thing, since most engines appear to treat commas as a space. After I get every important word or phrase from the text on the page, I add some common misspellings of some of these same words. I know for a fact that in the past, this could bring some traffic from some engines, most notably AltaVista.

What About Keyword Repetition?

Another common abuse of meta keyword tags was — and still is — the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would “think” they were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you’re using different variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag, even if you’re using different variations of it.

That’s about all there is to it! If everyone treated these meta tags with the type of respect they deserve and only put relevant keywords into it, perhaps we could get it out of its foster home and back to its rightful place in the family of meta tags!

Link Popularity Building and Increasing Page Rank

The theory goes something like this: The search engine powers-that-be, have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner, therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings (when all else is equal). If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones.

Most search engines are thought to place some emphasis on link popularity in their ranking algorithm. Some people believe that the number of sites pointing to your site is what determines your link popularity, and the more links there are, the higher your ranking will be. However, that is only partially true. The search engines (and those that program them) are not dumb. They are used to search engine spammers trying to cheat their way into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a site, but the quality of those links.

Building Vertical Links

Our vertical linking campaign will help you obtain listings on high-quality sites, which complement your business. Think of it as a partnership of sorts. If you sell shoes, perhaps we’d request links from sites that sell socks. Sell salt? What about those pepper sites? You get the idea.

Link Popularity Building can be used alone or in conjunction with any of the other search engine optimization services we offer. It is highly recommended that this option be purchased along with any full search engine optimization services. Increasing the links to your site will usually increase your rankings within the major search engines.

Making Key phrases Work for Your Site and the Search Engines

Does your site rank highly for key phrases that no one searches on? If no one is searching on your key phrases, it won’t matter how highly your site is ranked on the search engines. Here’s a technique for securing just the right keywords.

When a Web site needs to be optimized for high rankings, usually the first step is to find the key phrases most relevant to the site. But what happens when the key phrases that are most relevant are not the ones that people are actually searching out? Sure, you can probably get a high ranking for “Boston business directories,” but if no one is looking for that type of site, your high rankings will not bring your site any traffic.

We recently optimized a portal site for local businesses that had this very problem. Here’s how we overcame our key phrase dilemma.

The site was a portal for regional businesses. For the purposes of this article, let’s say it was based in the Boston area. The site had been optimized to rank highly for phrases such as “Boston business directory.” However, a quick Word Tracker report revealed that people weren’t using that phrase when searching the engines.

The report showed that the most searched-on phrases relating to Boston included “Massachusetts Lottery” and “Boston weather.” It also showed that people were searching for “Boston zoo,” “Boston airport,” “Boston classifieds” and “Boston restaurants.” At first, it seemed that it would be a daunting, if not impossible, task to optimize for key phrases that would bring targeted traffic to this site. However, the site owner was prepared to alter the focus of his site in any way he could to get more traffic. Together, we brainstormed an optimization plan. We thought long and hard about how we could integrate some of the key phrases mentioned above into this business portal without tricking the engines and the visitors. Finally, a plan began to gel.

The Transformation

First, the client found a script that showed the up-to-date local weather report and added that to the main page of the site. He also hired a programmer to create a script that would integrate state lottery results into his main page. He already had a listing of local restaurants, as well as a section for free local classifieds. All that was left to do was create a page of links to the most sought-after local sites, such as the zoo and the airport.

The next step was to rewrite the main page, focusing on the fact that this site now offered information on the Massachusetts lottery, Boston weather, and Boston classifieds. We also heavily emphasized the most important key phrases on the links page. The business directory itself was still prominently featured, however, it didn’t get the same focus on the page as it previously had.

Once everything was in place, we optimized the tags and other HTML code accordingly, and began the submission process. Luckily this site had not yet been submitted to the major directories such as Yahoo! and Looksmart. Using those directories’ business express services, we were able to get the key phrases “lottery,” “weather forecasts,” “restaurants” and “classifieds” into the descriptions, since these were now a major focus of the main page of the site.

Yahoo! did give us a bit of a problem at first by severely editing the description, however, a simple e-mail appeal worked wonders. Yahoo! added our important key phrases back in.

Lessons Learned

It’s been three to four months since submission, and the site is doing terrifically in the rankings. The key to success with this site was the site owner’s willingness to be flexible. While not every site will be able to alter so much of its content in accordance with popular search phrases, it’s often possible to make a few additions that don’t conflict too much with the focus of the site.

The site owner was also willing to take some risks. He was not making much, if any, money on his site, but he was willing to spend some money up front. He invested in our optimization services and in a programmer for the scripts he needed. It’s still too early in the game to know for sure how profitable this client will be, but something tells me he will eventually realize a tidy profit.

There are several lessons in this case study for anyone in business on the Web:
If your most relevant key phrases aren’t going to bring you traffic, find ones that will, and alter the focus of the site if you can.

If you’re serious about your business, you’ll often have to spend money to make money.

Now it’s your job to figure out how can you put some of this information to use for the benefit of your own site!