To better illustrate how this might look, we enlisted help of Web designer Dave Barry of SmartCertify Direct -- http://www.smartcertify.com/. Dave was kind enough to create an example site employing a transparent FLASH movie to help us visualize effect. As Dave explains...

"This flash movie was made transparent so you may see effects of putting text behind flash. Using Dynamic HTML, you can absolutely position a flash object right over top of your existing html code. Search engines see copy and text while visitors see your dynamic flash movie."

To see Dave's example, visit complete article found at below URL, and look for "Flash Sample." Once there, click anywhere in browser window, hold down CTRL and hit "A" on your keyboard (Ctrl+A = highlight all) to see how this sample FLASH movie would otherwise "hide" text were FLASH not transparent.

(To view Flash Sample, visit this article online at http://www.academywebspecialists.com/newsletters/0702.html)

Dave was kind enough to share with us source code he used to create effect, which can also be found above URL.

It should be noted this effect works only in browsers that support HTML version 4.0 or greater. This is only a minor concern, however, as vast majority of browsers that are being used today are compatible.

Yes, but will Search Engines tolerate "trick"?

Obviously most pressing question is whether or not search engines will accept, or reject, pages that make use of this strategy. After all, possibility of layering irrelevant content under, or even entirely off page (by assigning minus positioning coordinates) is a distinct possibility.

To anticipate how search engines might view this strategy, once again, we consider issues of "intention" and "relevancy."

Perhaps Stephen Baker, Director of Business Development and Marketing at FAST, said it best when he remarked, "Our position is pretty straight forward...it's not technique that we are concerned about, it's intention. If we index text in Z- Order and CSS and it's relevant to content, then we're all happy. But, as you know, we do have internal systems that trip wires all of time. If a particular technique becomes heavily abused over time, we'll definitely stop indexing information through said technique."

As we've said countless times before, certain legitimate Web site enhancements, like FLASH, frames, dynamic content, etc., are a nightmare for engines to index. They simply have never done a very good job on complicated HTML page, and FLASH poses, perhaps, greatest indexing challenge of them all.

Regardless, sites that use these upscale tools have as much right to be found as any others within their selected keyword categories. Projecting a professional image to your potential customers is important, and using Z Order within your CSS gives enables you to obtain that professional image without sacrificing search engine findability.

Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.

In a recent study by Yahoo, most site visitors are looking for information of some kind when they go to a site. By creating kind of information for your site in an easygoing article style that your visitors want, you can significantly increase both traffic and user time on your site.

While your site does already contain these keywords in your sales copy, it should be noted that providing free information for your visitors is ideal way to attract new visitors and to strengthen positioning of your website in Spider's databases.

When you do not have time or creativity to provide that information on your own, you could realistically tap into free-reprint market to attain content you want and need. To browse what may be available to you in free-reprint market, you can browse archives at:

http:/ opica.com/lists/FreeEzineContent

Here you will find over 800 articles available for your use.

The only drawback of using content created by another for free-reprint market is that terms for using these articles is to set up a hyperlink to website of author as given in resource box attached to article. The resource box serves as a small advertisement for author of article which must appear with all articles used. This is actually a small price to pay for getting high quality content for you to use on your website without cost.

If you feel that printing someone else's resource box is simply too high of a price to pay in order to provide content to your visitors and keywords for Spider search engines, then you should strike out on your own to develop your own content in this format.

However you cut it, any article placed on your website will generate 300 to 500 specialized keywords to feed Spider databases. In turn, as time progresses, you will discover more and more people flocking to your website from Spider search engines.

That is what you want isn't it? Traffic that can be turned into sales? Of course it is.

The time has come to start developing your website to take advantage of power of Spider search engines.