Well more specifically, with a flash site.

My site has been live for 1 1/2 months and I'm confused about a few things. I'm hoping someone here knows the answers.

1. In the Dashboard view, the bottom right pane (Content overview) shows my listed pages as / ....that's it. The only page listed is / Is this normal?

2. In the Traffic Sources pane it shows Google has only crawled it once. However, if I look at my Google Webmaster Tools, it shows Google has been there a bunch. Why the difference?

3. In Webmaster Tools, if I look at the "What Googlebot sees" page, it lists 14 words and all 14 are on my splash page. There is absolutely nothing from my actual site content or meta tags there at all.

I just today put a bunch of stuff way down at the bottom like others have hoping that helps. But until today all I had was "This site requires the latest version of Flash Player. Get it here (with a link)" and that is the only words Google is seeing. Well those and my site title.

It just seems like Google is not getting past my splash page and I'm not sure why or what to do about it. I know there are some of you here that have front page rankings with flash sites and I'm hoping you can either tell me this is normal, or point me in a direction of how to fix it.

Chris

Hey Chris!

Great questions!

The reason for the lack of results is b/c the flash technology your site is built on is a couple of years old so the search engines can't read very little info on your site except your homepage.

For higher ranking you'll want to make sure the search engines can crawl all of the pages on your site and that they can link to each page directly. Another thing that encourages the bots to crawl is lots of hits and new content added/changed. If the search engine comes back a few times with nothing new they won't come back very often.

I hope this helps.

Rock on,
DJ

Good info DJ, I didn't know about the changing content issue, I'm going to have to update more often. Does adding pages make a bigger difference (like adding galleries) or is just modifying text good enough?
I always got around the keywords issue by having an alternate html site but my next site will have the new flash stuff.
One thing that someone else (DJ?) might know, does new flash programing allow bots to read keyword tagging on images?

Hey Colin,

Yea - adding pages is good as long as the search engine can see those pages....if not then it's just another lost page inside a flash site.

Also, having an alternate HTML site isn't really a good way to go b/c all the links driving traffic to your site will be going to your main site not your alternate site. These links are really the best thing for search engines to determine relevancy.

SEO is such a mind numbing game and there are a dozen more things that can help improve ratings but the good news is that Flash and search engines are becoming more friendly.

Thanks DJ, yeah, SEO gets to be a bit much...I always call Tim H when I get lost! lol He got me to page 1 in my area...now if I could just improve San Francisco...
hmm, my links all go to my splash page and my analytics says I have 88 terms hitting me but I bet that's because I have so much on that page. This is good, motivates me to get my new site up!

Thanks for the help.

I guess this is the part I'm not understanding. Are you saying that with the technology my site is built on, Googlebot seeing all my content is impossible? I guess that would make sense being that the address never changes once I'm actually inside the site. However, I thought meta tags were supposed to be a way to help this, and I'm not understanding why they are not showing up in the "What Googlebot see's" area in Webmaster Tools.

Thanks for the reply If you have any more advice on what I could/should be doing to improve things, I'd love to hear it.

Chris

Hey Chris Yea - Metatags do next to nothing (maybe nothing anymore) .... anybody can type in things like that so the search engines mostly just ignore them now.