Flash and SEO Myths

Numerous web pages these days are adorned with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology will allow, in a very uncomplicated manner, to place small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages. Attractive as these flash animations might be they do have a huge impact on how the website is viewed by the search engines. Due to the limitations of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and earnings of the website will likely be impacted. What Are Flash Animations? When you create an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The ".fla" represents the Flash format extension. For you 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. Any text that you use in the animation probably won’t be indexed by the search engine because they hardly ever give attention to these formats. Regardless of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that can read the text in these animations. This means that any site or webpage that is developed entirely in Flash will be unseen to the search engines which index only textual content content in html format. Why Do Some Webmasters Use Flash Due to the minimal content contained on sites developed completely in Flash search engines may have difficulty indexing them and will as a result stay away from these websites. Moreover spiders are not abIe to read the content of a .swf file. Some webmasters use flash to build mini-sties for specific campaign sites. Here are a couple of reasons people find Flash worth the effort. It maximizes the animation's impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment. It could be blended successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). Therefore , it is perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content. Pros More content could be added to a more compact space without undue compromise of the layout. It's an easier solution to present slide shows or movies. Flash is ideal for making banners, ads and flash videos. For creating visual impact and attracting the eye to specific points of interest on a website Flash is the tool of preference. Cons Flash requires a great deal of bandwidth and take a long time to load. Most search engines will not index sites built completely with Flash. Changing Flash websites could be pricey if you use third party developers. The reason being they may code the project in a way that it will be challenging to create changes by yourself. To have your alterations made you will probably need to pay an additional fee. The "Back" button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords won’t approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this should you decide to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign. Flash doesn't care about the visitors' needs - movies that seem endless- sounds which you are not able to switch off will drive your visitors away. Splash Pages don't support your presence - they lack the text which contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products. Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not always easy. Your time and effort that must be done and the level of energy that must be allocated to SEO for Flash are much more than for the optimization of a HTML site.

When you need more information about flash components or you want to get some flash components, don't forget to read my previous articles.