tableless css questions regarding using h1 tag for SEO

Search engines dont just read the tag, the read the body content as well. If your sites are flash, you may want to consider having real content in there too for SEO, and ADA. Not tested, but maybe you can provide a hidden-from-browser content area below the flash where you store all the most important site content. You would just hide it by using display: hidden;. This way, people who depend on sited being ADA compliant, will still get some content, it just will not be visible on-screen. I have not tested this, im sure other people might have more ideas with SEO and ADA with Flash sites.

thx for the reply, should I use this in my css sheet or html?

Hmm flash sites will find little favour with us here we tend to believe in real coding -sorry to sound pompous.

If you are really concerned with SEO & I hope accessibility would it just not be easier to write in real markup?

However if flash is your route then it might not hurt to give this a thorough read it may help:

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/

Oh and by the way that site you link to suggests some bad practices, if you follow it's (bad)advise and start hiding links or text using color you will likely get penalised by Google for attempting trickery. Be very careful when employing techniques that purport to improve rankings as you can have a negative effect unless you know what you are doing.

I understand and saw that article you linked to. Rather than get into a discussion on the pros and cons of Flash I'm still using xhtml and css. I have the Flash content inside a div so I need to find the best way to have a hidden h1 tag so I can put some keywords inside.

rder

If you have to do it then don't hide it display:none; set it to position:absolute and use offsets to drag it off screen left:-9999em;

Don't just view the H1 as a vessel for stuffing keywords in that is not it's purpose it's a heading tag and requires meaningful text that alludes to the section of page it provides the heading for, do NOT place fragmented words in inside it that don't read as a sentence.

I thought the article I linked to was rather more than the pros and cons of flash it's meant to help You to do what you are asking about here? But perhaps it's too accessibility focussed rather than SEO

No stuffing keywords, a sentence or two of what the site is about. I bit confused about your answer, so you are referring to the html and not the css correct?

if you are referring to css then I would use a regular h1 tag as it would be the only one on the page and then assign it absolute and 9999em correct?

We are both referring to CSS and markup. A heading tag is markup and belongs in the main document, CSS is how you apply styling to that element.

Having written your element in the markup you would then hide it visually by removing it from the flow and then shifting it off screen with negative offset positioning, screen readers will however get to see this content, so whether that conflicts with the accessibility(text equivalents) you have already set in to the flash is another question.

How is this different from what I posted above? Will display:none; not work too? The html is still there, you just cant "see" the results on the screen, right?

True but then neither can some screen readers, display:none; means in effect doesn't exist. It's not really a reference to visual rendering.

The object element, like the img, provides for alternate content. In fact, object provides for a cascade of failover, i.e. multiple alternative content as the browser tries one thing after another until it finds something it can support.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="my.swf">
  <div>
    <!-- the html equivalent of the flash object -->
  </div>
</object>

IE may choke on the alternative content. If this is true for you, wrap the html in a conditional comment ....

cheers,

gary

May IE choke... enough said!

Hah! Twisting my words again, but I agree with the sentiment.

cheers,

gary