Local rankings and flash index pages - what are your thoughts?

[biggoogle]

Hi everyone,

I am about to send a FedEx letter to a local offliner who has deep pockets. He was referred to me by my client.

His site is nowhere to be found in the search engines because it isn't optimized and his first page is flash.

Here are my two questions:

Is it easy to convert a flash page to html to have quality text on it?

Can google spiders now read flash? If so, how would I go about putting text in the HTML/CSS? How would this work?

Thanks for your help.

BigG

[dburk]

Originally Posted by biggoogle

Is it easy to convert a flash page to html to have quality text on it?

Hi BigG,

No, if it was easy to convert then Google would have no problem converting it to HTML and indexing the content.

If the client is hell bent on keeping the flash content then just recreate the content contained in the flash as HTML and add it to the bottom of the page. This way search engines, and folks that don't have a flash player installed, can read the content.

Originally Posted by biggoogle

Can google spiders now read flash? If so, how would I go about putting text in the HTML/CSS? How would this work?

There is some methods to make flash content readable by search engines, however it is not easy to do and not as effective as using HTML.

Here's a link that describes Google's current abilities on indexing flash:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-indexing.html

[biggoogle]

Thanks for your help Don, I really appreciate it.

BigG