Do "splash screen" pages effect SEO?

[richard_ray]

If you go to First Touch Soccer (http://www.first-touch-soccer.com) you can see that they have an initial screen with their logo on and you can then click to enter the site.

Do pages like this affect search engine optimisation? If it were to have a description of what they do on there would that help?

[Wickham]

If you look at the source code of http://www.first-touch-soccer.com/
there are no meta names with description and keywords so they aren't giving any help to search engines!

However, search engines may notice other pages on the site.

It isn't just what is on a page that matters, it's also the number of times a page is viewed and from how many different links and what is in the meta tags... lots of different criteria.

If the splash page doesn't rate highly with a search engine another page on the site may rank higher so when that other page appears in say Google and people go direct to it they will just miss the splash page; no harm in that.

Most expert designers think splash pages are a nuisance, it's just one extra click to see what you want.