I design sites and up until recently I never really looked into SEO opt. I just started adding meta tags and keywords to all my headers and my first question is how long does it take for search engines to see sites I put one up on its server yesterday? Second question, how do you do SEO opt for Flash sites?
Flash sites are the absolute suck for SEO. If you want your sites to be found in the search results, develop HTML sites. If you want your sites to likely never be found in the organic search results, develop Flash sites. <meta> description and keywords elements are not used at all in Google for ranking purposes. Some less sophisticated engines still count the <meta> keywords element as a minor ranking factor, but it has been so abused over the years that few engines care about it. <meta> description does effect your click-thru-rate in the organic SERPs at Google when it gets displayed as the snippet for the result. I would recommend using them both. How fast the engines pick up your new sites depends on whether it has inbound links from other sites already indexed, whether you submitted the sites URL to the engine, whether you submitted a sitemap.xml, whether you're doing social bookmarking, when your first crawl gets scheduled by the engine, etc... Can be a matter of minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even more than a month. Just depends.
SEO for flash sites is very hard. One of the main problems is that search engines cannot read the content on flash sites as it see's the whole site as an image rather than text. HTML is always best, that does not mean that you cant some flash banners or some animation within your site though.
It depend on many factors including; how popular your website is and how where your site linked at. It could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or longer if you website is not optimize well internally and externally. Flash websites can be optimized to get good pagerank and good search engine position. Flash websites need to be optimized without the use of internal content, compared to non-flash websites that have content that is used to help establish relevancy of keywords. Flash websites need to be optimized with of a focus on external SEO factors, like posting backlinks on other relevant websites and/or link directories.
flash sites are not very easy to SEO, even professionals want to make their website`s non-flash so that they get those higher rankings. Spider will crawl your website and index new met tags and title tags withn 24-48 hours
Actually, for some time now (a few years at least) the major engines have been indexing content contained within Flash files using their own homegrown utilities. Google for sure has been doing it for years. They reverse engineered Adobe's binaries and built crude tools to extract text as part of the indexing process. And about a year ago Adobe gave the major engines their specifications for their binary files so that they would know exactly how to read the Flash binaries and extract all of the text contained in them. So the engines can read them. The biggest problem IMO with Flash is that typically Flash sites have a single URL (the home page) that calls an SWF file. The SWF typically contains the entire site, even if it's, say, a 20 page Flash site. It contains the 20 pages of content and all of the site navigation to move around those 20 pages. Even if the engines can read all of that content for a 20 page Flash site like this, it all gets indexed under a single URL - the home page. This would be the equivalent of taking 20 pages which each should be targeting a different keyword phrase and cramming all of that content into a single HTML page. That means you get 1 <title> element, for instance, for the entire site. It's MUCH harder to make a single page rank for 20 different topics. It is MUCH easier to make 20 pages each rank for a different topic because each page gets it's own <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, focused content, etc. Because of the fact that Flash sites get indexed typically under a single URL, on-page/on-site SEO is of practically NO value for Flash sites. It's 99.9999999% dependent on off-site SEO... in otherwords, the ONLY way to make it rank is via backlinks with targeted link text. I think this is what TheSEOMan was refering to above. Another big problem is that the search engines are all built around the concept of indexing HTML. The primary key in their index is a URL. All of their on-page ranking factors (<title>, <h1>, <h2>, etc.) are based on HTML elements. Their index schema, crawlers, indexing algorithms, ranking algorithms, backend systems, utilities/tools, etc. are totally based on HTML, not Flash. They've been indexing HTML for over a decade and are very good at it. To index Flash the way they do HTML would require ALL of those systems to be rewritten to support indexing Flash. As Matt Cutts told me, "Sites written in HTML will ALWAYS rank better than an equivalent site in Flash. It will be at least 10 more years before the major engines get even reasonably good at indexing Flash." Bottom line is that while Flash is "cool", it really does suck from an SEO perspective and will for a VERY long time. What is sad is that 99% of the time, a Flash site can be rewritten in HTML and look almost identical and have all the same functionality as it's Flash counterpart with the added bonus of also being SEO friendly. Most of the time people develop in Flash simply because they think it's cool and it's more fun than developing in HTML/CSS. IMO any site that cares about ranking should be written 1st in HTML, and THEN if you REALLY insist on showing off your Flash skills have a link on the HTML home page to a totally Flash equivalent site on a separate URL (like http://www.example.com/flashsite.html). But even that is kind of ridiculous IMO since it means double work for ever trying to keep the two in sync.
Get atleast one backlink from other site and must submit few social bookmarking site like digg.com, twitter.com etc.
ya should submit it to major search engine manually also to many directories, bookmarking, press release etc and den you can find your self sumwhr on search engine.....................
more work needed such as Article Submission, Blog Submission, social bookmarking and for flash sites its tough
The seo man is right. It's not impossible to do SEO for Flash sites. Google can crawl flash site content as well. See here- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html and http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html . You have to promote a flash site then do these things- Firstly start with average competitive keywords, make a good title and meta description, Start a PPC campaign for 2-3 months, Do link building, article submission, press release, social bookmarking, Blogging and forum posting and see the magic. Don't do anything aggressively. Have patience and get huge traffic.
Your site can get indexed quickly in social bookmarking site like stumbleupon. About flash sites google has new algorithm that can indexed content of flash sites.
Flash sites are a bit hard to optimize but still you can go for a good off page approach and definetely u'll get ur flash website ranked as well.
SEO is complex Is not about Metatags and puting a title and some keyword Backlinks On site optimization seo friendly structure site maps etc etc
hi, Google is now improved the flash indexing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Even though Google has gotten better at finding flash files and using the flash file naming for ranking, I hardl ever see a good website in a competitive industry rank while using flash. Stick to HTML.
For flash sites the best SEO strategy is to get the backlinks with anchor texts as targetted keywords
I agree with seowill, drop the flash and start building using another language like HTML, PHP, or if you've got the smarts, learn Ruby on Rails...