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…

Advertising and Marketing – The New & Old

Some years back, advertising and marketing were in the form of –

Media

• Television
• Radio

Print

• Newspapers (average cost of a classified AUD1,500)
• Magazines (average cost for half page AUD 15,000)

Outdoor

• Billboards (AUD 50,000 and above depending on the size, fabric etc)
• Ads on trams (especially in Melbourne)

Direct Mail (Mailing lists cost around AUD 14 - 50)

These methods cost a lot of money and a lot of time and effort went into creating them. Big corporations still do all of the above with a combination of some of the below forms of advertising.

New mediums of marketing which are cheaper or even better FREE!

With the advent of the internet, information is available and free. There is freedom to share knowledge and information. You do not have to pay for it. Better still, it allows small businesses to get publicity and traffic by paying very small amounts or nothing. It is no longer possible to
approach anyone with an aggressive sales pitch and hope to convert them. People are becoming blind to blatant forms of marketing and something new always interests them. The below methods are more subtle but the result is more effective.

Some of the newer and popular forms of advertising and marketing are given below:

Viral Marketing

Blogs (Blogger.com, Xanga.com)

Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, delicious)

Social Networking sites (Ecademy, Linkedin, Xing)

Online Press Releases (PRLog.com, PRLeap.com) - I provide services in this field

Article writing – I provide services in this field

Email Newsletter

Other paid forms of online advertising gaining popularity are:

Banners

Websites

Newer Marketing Technologies

Pay Per Click (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) – I provide services in this field

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Electronic Brochures

Streaming Video

Direct Response questionnaires

HTML presentations

Analytics – I provide services in this field

A combination of all of the above based on the industry you are in and the type of visitors you want to attract, all the methods mixed and matched form a great campaign.

Importance of online press releases

Press releases are an integral part of most company's (those who can afford it) PR campaign. From an SEO point of view, it is used as an integral part of our link buildig exercise.

Our lives have been made easier by the free online PR sites as it is light on our pockets. For small businesses who want to do some link building, PR is an ideal way to do it.

I-Newswire fell into Google's bad books after a 15-year old (Thomas Vendetta) played a prank by releasing a fake press release to the free site. You can read more here.

It remains to be seen if Google will drop all the free press release sites from their list or this is a one-off case which I hope it is. If not, then Google will be alienating a lot of small businesses or freelancers who cannot really afford to pay the exorbitant charges of the big boys.

An example of a free PR that I used recently - Website Owners Want Their Business To Be Found Online