Unfortunately, our index page is in flash (not my choice) and none of the text on the .swf can be indexed by search engines. Will site`s search results improve if I can only optimize the blog (ie keyword rich titles, meta descriptions, more text, image alt and title keywords)?
We also cannot optimize permalink because our blog is in Japanese and our titles tend to be in Japanese too.
Why not change the Flash implementation to show Flash content to those who can view it, and text information for those who can’t (search engines) - using a method similar to SWFobject.
thewpfan, I think the site map that stevie d was talking about was the html site map page not the site map you submitted to google. you need this html page to help the bots crawl all your pages.
I just really need search engines to pick up the blog without touching the other stuff. I have optimized everything I could do with the blog (keyword rich titles, meta descriptions, more text, image alt and title keywords).
I have also submitted a sitemap.xml file to google and yahoo.
Will this suffice?
@annescoffield
So I need a sitemap.xml to be submitted to search engines and a sitemap.html for the site too?
@seriocomic
Actually, I only manage their blog and noticed it was not being picked up by search engines so I was trying to optimize it. I am not supposed to touch their other web content.
I created a sitemap.xml file and submitted it to google and yahoo. Crossing my fingers that it will optimize the site since it has not been indexed by the search engines.
If what you want to be your front page is in Flash, but then you have content pages that are in properly-written and optimised HTML, you will usually find that search engines ignore the front page and go straight to the content pages.
If you don’t have any kind of HTML page that links to all the content pages (eg site map, full index) then you’re going to struggle.