Help required re. CMS sites.

[pennaedux]

Hello,

I've been (very successfully) doing SEO on the static page website breweryarts.co.uk for some time, and the powers that be have got an outside company to re-design the site in CMS which includes lots of Flash.

Now I have come to understand and realise there are many SEO pitfalls and considerations regarding dynamic sites so am requesting some assistance.

Please note, I am not a programmer, just a judicious user of metatags and content! Original (still live static site) made with Dreamweaver.

Thanks in anticipation...

[evilgreenmonkey]

If the website's content is contained within Flash files, then you can basically kiss goodbye to your search rankings. If it's just the navigation bar or some form of animation, you can work around these.

As for working with dynamic sites, there's too many things to list here really. I'd advise reading Aaron Wall's SEO Book to make sure that you cover all of the bases and to also read through the past threads on this board.

[SanDiegoSEO]

As EGM says, the flash mey hurt you, if the content of the page is in it. If its the navigation, just reproduce it with HTML footer links.

Dynamic websites can usually be easier to optimize. Get the CMS to be able to handle variables for keyword assignments, and you can dynamically populate elements like title and meta tags, and alt attributes and the like. For ecommerce websites, use product name and product category name variables if they're good keywords. Just remember, even if its a dynamic site, it's still HTML once it has been read by the spider. So just make sure what ever the final outcome is, it looks like a static optimized site.