Hi everyone... i'm Cristian from Romania and i'm a young flash developer... and for a while now i've noticed that making site is not enough for the customers... they also need a their sites to be place well in a web search... so i've started studying also SEO... and here is my dilemma: a local transport company wants me to build them a Flash site and they also need to place 1st in the SERP of Google when clients should search: "transporturi internationale" here is the search query: www.google.ro/search?hl=en&q=transporturi+internationale&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryRO... but i didn't promise the company anything until i study the competition... so i did... and the first website in the search is romexped.ro and here is my true dilemma... how did this site manage to place first??? and here is the SEO status: SEO Quake[Firefox addon] infos: PR:4 Google Index: 14 Google IBL: 1 Yahoo Indes: 69 Yahoo IBL: 227 Alexa: 9427367 Internal Links: 19 External Links: 5 Search Status[Firefox addon] infos: Internal Links: 48 External Links: 7 at first glance i tend to believe that this website's position is number one mainly because of lack of competition... or am i wrong here?? and my final question is this: if i want to make a full flash site[even though i will place exchange links at the bottom of the HTML that will include the SWF]... will i be able to surpass romexped.ro using only off page optimization methods or at least place in the 1st SERP?? hope someone could really help me on this one... i know there are a lot of SEO experts here... so i'll wait for your replies. thanks in advanced!
Yes, flash is not seo friendly but now google can also crawl the text inside the flash files and website can rank well. But your first options should be CSS and text base website.
You really have to do a css and flash based website if you want to aim to please search engines. You can still have some flash embeded into the text-based website. For example the header could be flash.
I think the competition for the keyword is low.. moreover if your website needs just to be flash then do the home page in flash with meta tags & description & also a backend blog and site with huge fresh content well linked with sitemap & submitting the same to search engines This might help the search engine to rank it properly IN MY OPINION
first of all the flash thing same like others say before me ... is simply stupid ideea to try to build good seo with that .... second is simply too expensive to build good seo and too expensive website for a company witch main busniess is for national/international transports honestly they NEED better tracks / better incomes for employers .... not PR 9-10 on google damn it .
thanks to all for the replies... and in a normal situation i would go for the html/css solution... but here i have the opportunity to make a flash site rank well in google due to the weak competition for the targeted keywords... and first of all i don't think that investing in marketing is a stupid idea... the company has been around for about 10 years and it's practically anonymous... and second i don't charge that much for the site and the SEO involved.. i'm pretty cheap as a matter of fact.
Romexped.ro is 4 years old site with quality content and proper backlinks. They have professional SEO and not overdoing it. That`s the reason why they rank well. Their weaknesses: - only 14 pages indexed, Google will give you a credit if your customer`s site would have much more topically related pages - only 270 Yahoo backlinks and most of them via ODP listing, you can beat them by stronger link building
it ain't that easy to drop flash... this is what i'm investing my time right now: learning AS3... and about romexped.ro... they have a great on page SEO... but the off page it's not that good... only 1 back link in google... even though it has over 270 in yahoo... they don't have reciprocal links with sites containing the same profile like bursatransport.ro for example... well.. dropping flash is not an option.. i'll have to learn how to use SWFaddress which imitates the structure of an HTML page... this will help google index the site better... and since the competition is not that scary... even if i don't get in the first place of SERP.. i have an opportunity to make a flash site and also place it on the first page.
I would skip flash to start with, the search engines can not read flash at this point. Another option to consider is flash parts of the site, if clients are set on this, but try to get plain text into the site somewhere at least a few hundred words on each page. A good way to optimise a site is to view competition for that word and see what they are all doing with titles, keywords, text backward links and just take the best bits from the competitors and that will give you a starting point to work from.