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I can’t even believe I am about to write this post. I’ve been adamant about how bad splash and all flash pages are and now I am about to take issue with WebDesignerWall’s SEO Guide for Designers on the same topic.

In their Guide for Designers they state, “I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage.”

I have no problem with the above. I agree it’s a big mistake, but here’s where things get a little murky. They go on to say, “Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.” The implication is that this has to be from the home page, but it doesn’t.

So why point this out at all? Why not just let the statement stay out there as a warning to Web designers? After all, it’s really a very good warning. The reason is that there’s another party in the design process - the client.

Recently I gained a client who wasn’t showing up in the search engines at all. One look at her Website and I knew exactly what the problem was. Her designer had built her a site that was one .swf file. I groaned and rolled my eyes and let out a big sigh because liek Webdesignerwall I see this all too often, and then I told her what we could do about it. The problem was she was completely attached to her “home page” which really is nothing of the sort in an all flash Website. I talked until I was practically blue in the face about why this was a problem, but she didn’t want to give it up. I suppose I could have just said “Well then I guess you’re stuck not showing up.” This, however, would have done her a disservice. The reality is she could keep her flash home page and show up.

WebDesignerWall makes the assumption, or at least leaves the impression, that the only way a search engine crawler finds your content is to come to the home page, but that isn’t true. If you find yourself in the same situation I did here are some steps to take.

1) Make an xml sitemap. You can have one auto generated at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

2) Add a robots.txt - all search engines look for this first to know what to do so point them to your .xml sitemap

3) Verify your site in Google’s Webmaster Tools

4) Add your sitemap address to Google’s Webmaster Tools

5) Go out and get links to your internal pages

6) Link back to your home page with the phrase you most want to show up for in the link text

I will agree with WebDesignerWall given my druthers I would absolutely swear off the splash page it adds nothing in my opinion, but if you have a client that insists than use the above.