Does an HTML site have an advantage over Flash sites because the content can be SEOd with HTML? How can a flash site do well?
O..definately text is king at google..so if you need to optimize your site and list under top ten..go for text based sites
Try to create a flash site for your visitors and the same site in html for search engines. Make a link to the html site on the home page.
Although there is an alt tag for flash, but html sites are king as far as seo is concerned. Try to avoid flash if you are serious about SEO.
If you want a really SEO on your website, try to drop flash frames. trust me! You need as much TEXT content as you can ! Especially for index !
If all you're wanting is to do is use a specific typeface for a headline or similar, you can use sIFR, which uses Flash to generate the title from a font file. It's completely accessible, simple to use and is readily indexed because all the SEs see is raw text, and any titles degrade to the specified CSS style. I've used it a few times, and it's a really nice option if you want something with a little more style than the standard web fonts...
as everyone else has mentioned, HTMl sites are much much better than flash sites in terms of SEO, simply because bots have a very hard time reading the flash content
Yeah SEO with flash sites is pretty much pointless as search engines have no way of reading text from an image (which is basically what flash is), so if google cannot read your content, it therefore cannot rank you for that content. you find most webmasters try to stay away from full flash sites like the plague. if you really want flash then just have a flash header, and the rest of your site in normal html so search providers can read your content.
Yeap, Search engines loves texts, so if you have a flash site, try to add tag, text etc. not just pure flash.