"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.

The first thing that I did was to redesign my navigation system to take advantage of this traffic and make sure that those who entered through back door would visit important departments of magazine. I also put a newsletter sign-up form on all inner pages, and to this day these pages are bringing in a steady stream of subscribers to magazine’s e-mail bulletin. The next thing I did was to make sure that inner pages had proper meta tags, and finally I did a deep submission of whole site.

What is a deep submission and why is it necessary? When you submit main page of your site to a search engine, search engine sends a “spider” to look at your page and put data on that page in search engines index. Sometimes spider will follow links on your main page and also pick up some of inner pages (Google, for example is very good at this) but sometimes they don’t go deep enough into site and only one or two of your pages are indexed. To get other pages indexed you have to submit them all separately, just as if they were other web sites. However, if you have 100 pages you can’t submit them on same day to one search engine. That would be regarded as spamming. If you submit one url per day per search engine you will not get into any problems.

So, think about your site more deeply. Your inner pages are mini-websites and if prepared and promoted properly they could increase your traffic and your sales dramatically.