Tips and advice on website structure for effective Search Engine Optimisation

Your website might look flash, but can the search engines see what it's all about?

Search Engines use programs called spiders, robots or crawlers that follow links and gather the content of web-pages to build their indexes. These bots can be quite advanced these days, but many do not cope well with JavaScript, Java, Flash, and other non-standard navigation systems.

An example of 'barricaded' content

I was looking through some old and abandoned projects recently, and decided to see if any of them had been developed elsewhere - purely out of professional curiosity. One of them seemed a bit odd and it didn't take long to see that what looked like a pretty normal website is actually entirely built in Flash.

If you look at the site in question, Cambridge HR Solutions, all will probably seem fairly normal, but if you take a look at Google's copy of the site by searching for "site:www.cambridge-hr.com" you will only find 1 web-page listed. If you click the 'Cached' link to view Google's copy and then click 'Text-only version', (top right), you'll see all the words that Google can see - or you would if there were any.