Of course, client (or maybe your boss?) is thrilled with dazzling presentation, and they rarely fail to mention what a "small fortune" it cost to produce before adding "it's worth it!...don't you agree? All it needs now is for YOU to optimize it for findability in search engines."

Isn't it funny? ... how they fail to notice color rushing to your face as you suppress urge to scream and opt instead for tactful approach, patiently explaining (once again) that FLASH doesn't score well in search engines.

Don't panic -- there IS a solution!

Here's a solution you can use to get best of both worlds - search engine findability and professional image enhancement that FLASH can provide.

The strategy involves using an absolute positioning technique called Z Order within your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). For this to make sense, you must first understand what Z Order is. Microsoft's MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com) site explains...

The Z order of a window indicates window's position in a stack of overlapping windows. This window stack is oriented along an imaginary axis, z-axis, extending outward from screen. The window at top of Z order overlaps all other windows. The window at bottom of Z order is overlapped by all other windows.

In non-technogeekspeak, Z Order allows you to place content partially, or even fully, on top of other content. Since only content on top is viewable, it's entirely possible to place an unintelligible-to-search-engines FLASH movie on top of an easy- to-index-layer of relevant text content. And, by doing so, your site visitor sees only FLASH movie while engine sees only your relevant keyword-laden text.

How to create Z Order using CSS

To accomplish magic it's helpful to first understand what a very basic CSS using Z Order source code might look like. To view basic example, visit complete article online at: http://www.academywebspecialists.com/newsletters/0702.html

Source of example: http://www.htmlref.com/examples/Fig10- 14.htm

Notice that highest value --

It was only after discussing subject with another web master, who had a similar site, that I learned that diversity of all inner pages of my site was a huge asset. Each of these pages was like a mini-website, and capable of attracting a multitude of visitors using a variety of keywords. Part of my ignorance at that point was due to a lack of accurate tracking data. I had a simple tracker on main page that told how many visits that page was getting, but I had no idea of what was happening deeper inside site. Then I was able to get access to raw access logs of site and using a log analysis tool I began to see real picture of what was happening.

I saw that main page was getting one third of total traffic of site. I found out that one article, “The Causes of Tropical Deforestation” was a big hit and consistently getting a lot of traffic. Other articles were also quite popular, but covering completely different subjects. It was then that I realized that I had not one web site, but more than 100 web sites.

What does all this mean in terms of design, optimization and submission? It means that one has to realize that people may well enter your site through “side door” or “back door” and you have to prepare accordingly.