Beautiful Website or Blog Website For Google Love?

I think flash websites are the most difficult kind of sites to rank. but since you are doing for a client, you don't really have a choice right?

I would suggest that maybe you can put words under the flash to add some visible content for both the search engine and the human eye.

A new blog site is good too but it'll take you some time for you to rank. And depends on your competition, you may need alot of work to rank.

Thanks George and thats what I thought. I did talk them into letting me make them a blog site to rank instead. I figure a new site with 10 keyword rich posts is better than a flash site with no content or even just 250-350 words on the page. What do you think? Thanks again.

I would definetly build a new site. Google won't index a website if it can't read the content. I know that flash sites have a nice look, but if you want the to reach a first page on Google and make money you need to have real, high quality content.

Of course, generate backlinks, too!


William

Building a new site is definitely great.. The only thing is - how do you convince them to let you build a new blog site for them? (hardest part is to persuade them when I was doing some offline consulting).. or persuade them to have a half flash half html site.

another way is to expand their existing site to have a blog. so there would be a nav menu with blog and some disclaimer and stuff.

Could you not register a new domain $10 install a blog, get it ranked then put some links to the old site..they may embrace the new and not lose the old kind of thing..

Thanks guys and I spent a good 2 hours on the phone with the owners and did talk them into letting me create the new site/ blog for them.

I just really wanted to get some more opinions from you guys that I was doing the nest thing and not just doing more work than necessary. I started doubting myself when I noticed a few sites ranking on the first page of google with little to no content. But I know its because no one really knew what they were doing and its a spray and pray type site.

It took a good 30-40 min to get my client to agree to let me build a blog site. Obviously they were disappointed that their beautiful high priced flash website was being abandoned. Actually they kept saying they didnt want to trash it and get rid of it because they spent so much time, money and effort on it. Even though I kept telling them we are just adding a blog to compliment it and better dominate google and the search engines. That pretty much sold them on the idea.

Thanks again for the awesome feedback guys. Tomorrow im gonna start their new blog site.

Recently I've heard a lot of hype about optimizing websites with flash. These seem to be pushing alternate content for the search engines. While standards bodies support the use of these methods I tend to think that search engines what to give people what they want not based on what a website says it's about but what the search will actually find when they get there. The alternate techniques smack a little of black hat SEO techniques. Yes some flash websites will rank well from other methods and Google is starting to dig into the flash, but I think the battle is still raging between flash and text.


A few tips for using flash (if you must use it):

• Create descriptive useful page titles and meta descriptions.
• Embed the flash into HTML pages and use regular text links on the page if possible.
• If it does not screw up the design too bad add HTML text to the page.
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using noembed tags.
• Instead of including everything in one flash file it may make sense to break the content into different flash files so you can create different HTML pages around the different ideas contained in it.
• Macromedia has a search engine SDK, although I think most sites are still best off using texual representations of the flash files on the HTML content of pages
• Mike Knott also recommended this JavaScript plugin for flash detection. It is XHTML compliant, and, so long as you use it properly, it is better than the Noembed tag.