A big misconception I hear about flash is its negative connotation regarding search engine optimization. And flash gets a bad rap because of it. Many people have asked me about flash and have heard the rumors and concerns about how it can hurt your site when it comes to SEO. The short answer is yes it can. But that does not mean you need to shy away from flash entirely. In fact, flash can greatly enhance the visual aspect of your website. This article will clear up all of the misconceptions regarding flash and SEO.

Text

Search engines are not able to crawl text which is embedded in a flash object. The search engines are only able to crawl static HTML text on a webpage. There is probably a way to get around this, but it is certainly not worth the hassle. And since the on page text is so important to the search engine and is imperative for seo, this will need to be simple, static HTML text. Maybe one day the google, yahoo and the other search engines will revise their search engine spiders to crawl flash text more efficiently, but at the moment it does not work that way.

Links

Another important aspect of seo is links and your internal website linking strategy. The search engines need to crawl links in your web pages and any links embedded in flash objects also cannot be crawled. If your navigation contains flash buttons and flash links, then as far as the crawlers are concerned, your page contains no inbound or outbound links. As far as seo is concerned, this is a negative because it limits your page rank. You need to increase your website’s overall page rank by developing a solid internal linking strategy and deep link to other pages on your website. If the search engines do not recognize this linking strategy, it will just recognize the site as being only a few pages, or worse just one page.

Recommendations for flash

The websites which we design make use of flash in moderation. Our flash presentations do not skimp on visual design and at the same time do not increase loading time. At the same time, we do not include any important SEO factors within the flash object so it simply adds another visual piece to the website puzzle. Your website needs to look professional and visually appealing and flash can help with that. There is no need for a long flash intro as it only aggravates users (most, if not all, users look for the “skip intro” button so they can get to the website). Sometimes it causes them to leave because they do not want to sit through a long and drawn out flash intro, not to mention the fact that flash intros take awhile to load on the page. By using flash in moderation, your site will not load slowly (which is a burden for users and search engines), your site will look visually appealing and you will not negatively impact your site for search engine optimization.

Author Bio: John Ferrughelli is the founder and president of Potenture, a professional website design and SEO company. His company specializes in SEO, Pay per click marketing, website design and social media marketing.

Category: Internet
Keywords: seo, flash, search engine optimization, using flash with seo