Flash: what is SEO?
Today, a lot of websites employ flash animation products from companies like Adobe. Basically flash animation gives webmasters the ability to include small animated vectors into their web pages.
Appealing as these flash animations may be they do have a huge impact on how the website is seen by the search engines. Due to the limitations of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and profitability of the website will be affected.
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. In order 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 using for your web site.
Any text that you include in the animation probably won’t be indexed by the search engine as they rarely give attention to these formats. In spite of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that are able to read the text in these animations. The result is that any site or webpage that is built entirely in Flash will be invisible to the search engines which index only text content in html format.
Why Use Flash for Sites?
It is not a secret for anyone that search engines don’t really like sites that are built using Flash exclusively. These sites rarely contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though every now and then for mini-sites or for campaign sites.
Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:
It maximizes the animation’s impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment.
Flash combines well with other technologies like php, mysql, xml, video, sound etc. This makes it possible to include flash in a completely dynamic website.
Pros
More content can be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
It is an easier way to present slide shows or movies.
It is a great tool to create banners and ads, and even Flash videos.
For creating visual impact and drawing the eye to specific points of interest on a website Flash is the tool of choice.
Cons
Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth and take a long time to load.
Most search engines don’t like and don’t index Flash.
You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers – if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won’t be able to make any changes and you will have to pay them for modifications
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 if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash may interrupt the visitor’s experience on the site. For instance, never ending movies and sounds without volume control may drive some site visitors away.
Splash Pages will reduce your visibility in the search engines especially if there is insufficient text on the site that can be used to identify the keywords associated with your products and services.
Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of a HTML site.
