A specific case

As an example, I would like to relate a little story about a certain web site which I found difficult to locate. This particular web site is that of a fine dining establishment in a nearby community.... I did not know if they actually had a web site, let alone the address they would use, so I decided to look in a popular search engine. I typed the company’s name in the search box, then clicked on the search button.



There was a great number of sites listed in the search results. However, none of them seemed to pertain to a restaurant. To get more relevant search results, I decided to include the name of the town where the company is located in the search terms.

I was then presented with listings of web pages that did mention the restaurant I had in mind. Unfortunately, all of these pages were restaurant reviews and business news articles, not the restaurant’s web site. What could be wrong? Did this company not have a web site at all?

As luck would have it, one of these articles mentioned the web site address, though they did not provide a link to the site. So, off I went to visit their web site.
I must admit that it is a beautiful site, with extremely professional graphics, as well as music. (At least they provided a means to disable the music.Many other sites could take a hint from this.)

The content of their site is a Macromedia Flash multimedia presentation which has been embedded as an object in their web page.

Why should I have had such difficulty in finding their site? Perhaps it has some connection to the site developers’ having little apparent understanding of basic SEO techniques.

How much does Google know about that web site? Here is everything Google could come up with (I have changed the domain name and identifying details so as not to embarrass the site owners or developers.):
bob smith dining

www.somerestaurant.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
bob smith dining

www.somerestaurant.com/noflash.php - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
[FLASH] www.somerestaurant.com/interface.swf
File Format: Shockwave Flash
Similar pages
bob smith dining

www.somerestaurant.com/index.php?flash=true - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
That’s the extent of it. Google knows that the site exists, and it knows that there is flash content, but it has no idea what the site is all about. It doesn’t know if it is a site for a restaurant, or a site trying to sell miniature chainsaws.

This does make sense when you view the underlying content of the site. The only actual text that I could find on their web site, other than seven words listed as keywords in a meta tag, was this (Again, appropriate names have been changed.):

To view the Bob Smith site, your browser must have the latest Flash plug-in.
If you do not have the plug-in, click here to download.
phone: 217.555.1212

To a computer program that can only read plain text, like the Googlebot program that crawls web sites, this doesn’t really convey a lot of pertinent information.

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