Blonde Ambition – Web Design Portfolio by Leanne Norris

Do you have a website that is built entirely in Flash and concerned about how well your site is doing in search engines? Perhaps you are thinking of having a site built in Flash and would like to understand how SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can be affected? Here are my thoughts on this issue.

Not every search engine is able to crawl and index the content of all Flash websites. Even those that can often do it with errors. This is certainly the case with a website fully implemented in Flash as a single file.

You will notice that the URL never changes no matter where people navigate on the site. As a result, search engines are unable to direct visitors to the proper page within that file. As the site only has one potential entry page (the main URL), this cuts off all potential pages that could otherwise be indexed in search engines. Therefore, it is very difficult to target a wide assortment of keyphrases, potentially eliminating SEO results or rankings.

Search engines rank pages based upon a number of criteria, but one of the most important to SEO results is the text that they can “understand” on individual pages. At present, search engines read primarily HTML text. As all the text is included in the Flash file, the search engine will find it difficult to read the text and therefore will not know what the page is about, which could harm SEO results.

Full Flash websites often have the browser’s back button disabled. From a usability point of view, the back button is one of the most important navigation elements after hyperlinks. If you are going to promote a Flash site via pay-per-click advertising, you should know that Google AdWords doesn’t approve pages with a disabled back button.

Recommendations

If you would still prefer a full Flash site then at the very least, make sure that basic meta data has been added to the site code. Title, description and keywords will enable search engines to find and display your site under correct search terms.

An option would be to create an HTML version of your Flash site, and let users choose their preference. In that way, you get to keep your Flash site as it is and the HTML version is used for search engine spiders and users who either prefer HTML, do not like flash intros or simply do not have flash enabled on their PC.

My top recommendation would be to create your site in HTML, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons and banners. Therefore, you get to keep the moving elements of your site but the text is displayed as HTML to improve SEO performance.