Flash Vs SEO

This topic has been written about ad nauseam but….

Many website owners want Flash on their website (many that I know, at least).

Designers are willing to do it for them. When the time comes to do online advertising, the Search Engine Consultant tells them that search engines cannot read flash files.

Now the website owner is confused. Why didn’t the designer tell him? Does this mean that all the money and time spent on having Flash files has gone down the drain?

I will attempt to answer some of the questions here.

Many designers do not know about this. Their job is to code/design and many of them do not know about the search engine marketing aspect of it. Would you ask your IT department to do your marketing for you? No. One group is logical and the other is creative. Two different worlds.

SEO must go hand in hand when designing the site. This saves time, money and frustration for both the designers and the website owners.

Whenever I see website owners going in for Flash, I caution them. Search engines look for certain things in a website:

• The website must load fast
• The back button must work especially if you are going to do Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
• No redirects to another page – This is considered as spam by search engines.

When you use Flash files:

• It often takes a long time for a website with Flash to load.
• Many flash files disable the "Back" button on the website
• Flash files often redirect to another page

Look at it from a user's perspective, if I come to a website with extensive flash in it and I have a dial up connection, I am not going to wait for the site to load. I just press the "Back" button and move on, as do many users. (Ouch, that hurt, didn’t it?).

The reason why search engines do not read Flash files?

Optimizing a Flash file includes creating text which has to be hidden so it cannot be seen by the human eye. This is easy to abuse and manipulate to hide spam, porn or other redirected sites.

Google has started indexing Flash files (at least the latest version of Flash) but it should be designed to have text in them. It is still a mess when it comes to getting ranking and generally advisable to avoid Flash files.

Separating each page of the Flash movie into separately crawlable pages is the advise of one consultant. More about the pains of optimizing a flash site is here.

If you still have not got the message, here's a flow chart that might convince you.

If you are still not convinced, here's something you can use…