Thanks for your great service. A friend is giving me some advice that I should use Javascript instead of flash headers, as Javascript can be indexed. But what if I don't really need the contents of the flash header indexed? Is Javascript really better? Or is flash more or less 'invisible' to the search engines, and therefore it does not cause a problem (or mess up the SEO)? Thanks.

Hello,

If you do not wish the search engines to index your content then I think it will be simple to use Flash. Search Engines tend not to index any flash content as they can not access it, so if you have no reason for it to be indexed then it should be fine.

Of course, if you want your content to be indexed then avoid building a pure flash website, or have a text equivalent that search engines can read.

OK, thanks for that.

While we have the complete opposite in hair styles, I've got an SEO-expert friend telling me he doesn't think my SEO is any good.

>>On your page, it's not until line number 582 that I finally see some actual text content: "Welcome to the Stick of Ephraim!" The search engines rarely go that deep into the source code of a page, and it IS the source code that they index, not what you see rendered in a browser.

I think he was checking www.stickofephraim.org, which is still in progress. Or maybe it was www.normanwillis.org, which is also still in progress.

Anyhow, Lee, his concern is that I get the very best SEO rankings possible. He has been giving me some major clues about what words to put in the Keywords box on the Admin > Pages menu, but what can I say to him? Is it normal for the content to be down around line 582? And will this cause any problems with the search engines?

I am having to hire a developer to do all the rest of my stuff, because I'm just too busy, but I told myself I would pay attention to the SEO personally. Can you help?

Thanks.

Hello,

You can deal with the positioning of the content in the source code through the use of your skin.

Have a look here:
Pure CSS SEO Layouts for DotNetNuke skins

In DNN 5 there is also a widget available that can move the order of the source code in the skin, I have not tested it yet but will be doing soon.

In your skin on www.stickofephraim.org there is a lot of code before it reaches the main content, som eof which is the viewstate. You can move the viewstate to the bottom by using Snapsis PageBlaster module.

The tutorial above should show you the techniques I use to clean up the skin and get it working much more efficiently for SEO.

Will Strohl has a nice blog post that shows how to use the new "Relocation" skin object to move viewstate to the bottom of the page. 

To be fair though, moving the viewstate on the client side has no SEO benefit.  By the time that the widgets execute, web browsers and search engine spiders have already read and parsed the viewstate.  If you're looking to move the viewstate for SEO benefit, you need to find a solution that moves it on the server, before IIS sends the page to the browser.

Thanks for the info Will, yes I would recommend you use Snapsis PageBlaster for moving the viewstate and also improving the performance of your page load times.