[martin54]

Website for the artist Ray Landon, welcome any feedback.

raylandonart.com

thanks for your time

[fasterthanlight]

Ok after all your hard work, i am going to go ahead and be that guy:

Why is this Flash???

There is nothing here that cant be done with HTML.

[rampagegfx]

First impression: Flash for a splash page.. hrm.
Complete flash layouts don't really work out well for SEO reasons, the smooth typeface is either loved or hated, doesn't really appeal to me.

Your work is pretty conceptual I must say. How many tabs deep do you drop until you start painting?

[martin54]

My first site, I didn't know about all the issues with flash when I began

[martin54]

Sorry not my work, Ray Landon's

[martin54]

I have made some effort to make the site SE friendly but being a beginner am not sure if my attempts will work at all. Would appreciate it if someone could look at my source code and let me know if SEs will even index this site

[Synook]

Originally Posted by martin54

I have made some effort to make the site SE friendly but being a beginner am not sure if my attempts will work at all. Would appreciate it if someone could look at my source code and let me know if SEs will even index this site

Well, tell me, how are search engines going to read the contents of your site when it is in Flash?

Also, humans need to see things happening, or leave. A loading bar would be good. Is that splash page really necessary?

[Agricola]

Originally Posted by martin54

I have made some effort to make the site SE friendly but being a beginner am not sure if my attempts will work at all. Would appreciate it if someone could look at my source code and let me know if SEs will even index this site

Index it with what? all your main content is tied up in flash. There is nothing in the code , apart from a couple of the meta tags which hardly have any significant influence from SEO point of view.

Here is what you need to do , Ditch FLash and use HTML.

A few years ago flash websites were all the rage , in fashion and the must have design, however , like tables flash web sites are miss used and 99% of the time inappropriate.

What is even more horrendous is that you simply produce a dull plain text page with nothing happening, I could understand you using flash if you had amazing over the top graphics and animations and so on going on, but no, you have plain text.

If you want to get on in life involved with websites, then either learn (X)HTML CSS inside out, or just develop your flash skills and produce flash content, but please, stay away from making whole sites in flash. It sucks.

[martin54]

I explained earlier that this is my first website and I was unaware of the issues with flash, SEO and accessibility. I like playing with fancy effects and animation but i thought this content was unsuitable for a website displaying an artists work. I know now HTML would have been more appropriate for this site but I am a beginner so it would of probably been visually shocking. There isn't much in competition for rankings of the keywords Ray Landon so I thought some simple techniques maybe enough if google etc index the site. The splash page was a request from the client.

Does anyone have any comments about the websites design?

[Synook]

Originally Posted by martin54

There isn't much in competition for rankings of the keywords Ray Landon so I thought some simple techniques maybe enough if google etc index the site.

The problem is that search engines cannot read text in Flash. Simple. Also, modern search engines will not read keyword metadata and descriptions do not contribute to keywords indexed. So, most search engines will not even see the word "Ray Landon", much less index it. Also, with no content your ranking will never get very high...

Originally Posted by martin54

I know now HTML would have been more appropriate for this site but I am a beginner so it would of probably been visually shocking.

Well, time to start learning...

[martin54]

I didn't really want my post to turn into a lecture about using flash appropriately, I was hoping to receive some constructive criticism about the design of my site and possibly some SEO tips. If everyone's only SEO advice is not to use flash, its not massively helpful at this stage but thanks for your time

[INXS]

Well, like everyone else, your site is a little on the boring side. Never use flash unless its needed, and in this case, its missused.

You should have just easily done this through html/css for better search results through search engines, and ALSO better editability compared to flash. Flash is great, but not for easy 4 page sites with images and text.

there are millions of helpful websites that can teach you the ins and outs of coding in html/css. you seem to know how to get a webpage up, why not code it in html/css. It would be much easier, and compatability wise, more helpful for the client. you have to put your foot down at times and be the designer, not the client. yes, clients want this and that, but you have to let them know what is best and what is not, and what are the better options.

[mrblack]

Originally Posted by Synook

The problem is that search engines cannot read text in Flash. Simple. Also, modern search engines will not read keyword metadata and descriptions do not contribute to keywords indexed. So, most search engines will not even see the word "Ray Landon", much less index it. Also, with no content your ranking will never get very high...


Well, time to start learning...

Whewwww!!! Okay let's start here. Apparently there is not much useful SEO advice as you've repeatedly asked for. So going to first correct a misconception in the above quote. Some of the major Search Engines (in particular Google) can read text in flash, just not as well as an html site in most cases. This has been true for some time and has recently been improved upon since Adobe has released Flash algorithms to Google to help with this issue.

Regarding Meta data; Meta data is still important for several reasons. Several engines (yes, including Google) do pay attention to these tags (e.g. to help fill in descriptive text for listings). These tags can also be utilized for several other devices and definitely still have their place. The keywords should still be included here, but not really relied upon for the definitive source for many engines.

Google will pay heavy attention to titles and header tags. This is something that is really lacking in your site. Every page has the same title. These titles are meant to be descriptive. Imagine if you read a book and the title of every page was the name of the book. How useful would that be? Ultimately search engines really look for semantic structured mark up. So write every page with the structure that it should have if it were e.g. print, this will help with engines such as Google.

There are many other factors such as external link quality, in-bound links, page rank of in-bound links and one way links. I could definitely go on, but think I've said a pretty big mouthful about it.

In finishing I would suggest this:

1. Separate out your flash effects into smaller components so they do not dominate the entire page (flash nav components, flash header components, etc...). This allows you to mix more HTML content and still use the flashy effects that you enjoy.
   
2. Link to an external style sheet instead of including it in the header of every page (the styles in each document are just more garbage for the search engine to have to get past to get to the content). Search Engines do not really care about the styles of the page in most cases (print media alternative pages might be an example that I can think of).
   
3. If you will be using any heavy Java Script then you should externally link to what you can. Some scripts will not function well this way, but most will and should be separated in this way. This is for the same reason as external style sheet linking.
   
4. Put your meta tags above the styles and scripts (meta tags should usually be first since that is more pertinent to search engines).
   
5. Try utilize more HTML content and less flash content (Everyone has drilled this one in the head several times).
   
6. Make your tags all start with lower case (this is more of a semantic markup issue).
   
7. Create keyphrase and keyword rich titles that differ for every page and relate to the content that is included in that page.

Best of luck with future development, and the site is not to bad for a first design.