Craig,
 In retrospect my original email about this was neither helpful nor 
enlightening with your problem Craig, for that you have my 
apologies.

 Your opening page is a flash splash page. It lacks the necessary 
hooks required by the search engine spiders to delve deeper into 
your site. Consequently even IF that page managed to get indexed, 
it would be the only page indexed. And to be honest, I don't think this 
page meets the minimum requirements for indexing.

 You can easily fix this problem by adding a simple html link at the 
bottom of the page, something along the lines of SKIP INTRO in 
plain html link would be sufficient for the search engines to detect 
the deeper link.  Adding the link would probably allow the search 
engines into the next page, but it probably still wouldn't result in your 
main page being indexed.

 Unfortunately the way this page is set up, nothing in its current 
design is indexable by the search engines. I don't know where 
designers got the idea that the search engine spiders are capable of 
handling a flash binary stream, but all of the content embedded in 
the flash is totally ignored. ZERO content. 

 Now lets get straight to the heart of the matter, and in doing so, I'll 
probably anger nearly every designer on the list. BUT the simple 
fact is the search engines index VISIBLE PAGE TEXT, not text 
embedded in flash, not text cleverly hidden in an image, not text 
embedded in a javascript. Plain old page text, right there, out in the 
open html.

 The opening page has none of that. So even if the search engines 
visited the site, you have given them nothing to chew on, nothing to 
work with. 

 From the splash page you jump right into a frameset page, which is 
missing a noframes section. Now this might come as a shock to 
you, but there are only two search engines capable of extracting 
links from within a frameset command, so most search engines will 
not pick up any interior links and spider deeper into the site. 

 Adding meta tags to your frame.html would help, but only a little. 
And from what I can see, none of your interior pages have any meta 
tags at all. Again, meta tags would help, but only to the extent that 
they would amplify the messages being conveyed by the page text. 
In the case of your frame.html, there isn't any page text at all. The 
search engines aren't going to index a page like this. Period, end of 
story.

 Think of the search engine spider as a browser. And its probably 
the stupidest browser on the planet. It can't handle java, it can't do 
frames, it can't handle flash, it can't handle streaming media, can't 
do javascript, won't index any page with a pass parameter in the url 
etc... If you can keep that idea firmly fixed in your mind you can 
design sites that use these technologies and still achieve high 
rankings in the search engines. Forget that fact and you might as 
well close up shop and go home. Your designs will not be found in a 
search engine.

 Hope some of this helps.

	Bob Minnick, Northern Webs
Bob Minnick, President, Northern Webs 208.265.0474                                                           |
Mainpage:      http://www.northernwebs.com
Meta Medic:    http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html
SpiderView LC: http://www.northernwebs.com/set/spider_view.html
SpiderView DA: http://www.northernwebs.com/set/spider_view_da.html

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