subject: Flash And Search Engine Optimization [print this page] Numerous web pages these days are embellished with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology facilitates, in a very uncomplicated manner, to embed small animated, vector-based drawings into your webpages.
Obviously, these types of animations have some effect on the way your site is "viewed" and indexed by the search engines. The issue of Flash Search Engine Optimization develops, which is a grave issue regarding conversion and web site earnings.
What Are Flash Animations?
Whenever you produce an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The ".fla" represents the Flash format extension. To be able to display this file in a web page, you need to export it in Shockwave Format (extension .swf). It is this file, once exported, that you will be making use of for your web site.
If the animation you have created consists of text, it won't be taken into consideration by the majority of the search engines, as they never pay much attention to this format. Still, you'll find search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text placed within the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) which is designed fully in Flash will consequently pass almost "unseen" by search engines, that index, almost exclusively, text content in HTML format. Nevertheless, the HTML file that launches the Flash animation will be crawled by search engine's spiders.
Why Do Some Webmasters Use Flash
It's not a secret for anyone that search engines don't really like websites which are created using Flash exclusively. These websites almost never contain sufficient appropriate text to allow for a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though from time to time for mini-sites or for campaign sites.
Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:
The impact of animation is maximized with flash which enhances the webs interactive and aesthetic environment.
It can be merged effectively with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore quite possible to produce a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros
More content could be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
Flash makes it much simpler to feature slide shows and movies into a website.
Flash is perfect for producing banners, ads and flash videos.
It's a good instrument for making great visual impact and drawing awareness of specific points of interest on a web site.
Cons
Sites utilizing flash may take some time to load and it boosts bandwidth consumption.
Most search engines do not like and do not index Flash.
Modifying Flash websites could be costly if you are using 3rd party designers. The reason being they might code the project in such a way that it will be challenging to create modifications by yourself. To have your changes made you'll probably be forced to pay an additional fee.
The "Back" button is normally disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords wont approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, watch out for this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash doesn't care about the visitors' needs - movies that seem to be endless- sounds that you can't switch off will drive your visitors away.
Splash Pages will lower your visibility in the search engines particularly if there's limited text on the site which they can use to distinguish the keywords associated with your products and services.
It is not always easy to optimize flash for the unpredictable search engines. The amount of time and energy it takes for Seo for Flash websites is far greater compared to work required for an HTML site.
