wilf64jordan's Journal

Flash and SEO
Many web pages nowadays are embellished with flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology allows, in a very simple manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages.
Of course, these animations have some influence on the way your site is "seen" and indexed by the search engines. The problem of Flash Search Engine Optimization arises, which is a very serious matter in terms of conversion and web site profitability.

What Are Flash Animations?
Flash files carry the extension .fla. For example a file might be named banner.fla where the .fla represents the flash format extention. The file will then need to be exported into a Shockwave Format (extension .swf) for use on the web page.
If the animation you have created contains text, it won't be taken into account by most of the search engines, as they don't pay much attention to this format. Still, there are search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text inserted in the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) that is built entirely in Flash will therefore pass almost "unseen" by search engines, which 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 Use Flash for Sites?

Due to the limited content contained on sites built entirely in Flash search engines will have difficulty indexing them and will therefore avoid these sites. Additionally 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.
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
It allows the designer to put more content in a small-sized space without damaging the layout.
Flash makes it easier to include slide shows and movies into a website.
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
Sites utilizing flash could take some time to load and it increases bandwidth consumption.
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 doesn't care about the visitors' needs - movies that seem endless- sounds that you cannot turn off they will drive your visitors away.
Splash Pages don't favor your visibility - they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products.
It is not an easy task to optimize flash for the unpredictable search engines. The amount of time and energy it takes for SEO for Flash websites is far greater than the efforts required for an HTML site.