Flash Websites – Give Your SEO a Break – SEO Tip

I saw a banner ad the other day – “Create Free Flash Websites”.   Simple, direct communication written in the imperative.  It’s a good ad. 

Here is some equally simple, direct communication, also written in the imperative. 

“Don’t”. 

Don’t create FREE flash websites.  From an SEO perspective I’d say don’t create Flash websites at all.  Those flashy effects you love so much often tire quickly for your visitors and create little real value for you.   Meanwhile you’re creating a needless barrier to your SEO.

I’ve seen good Flash websites.  There may be markets and individual businesses where the visual impact is worth the tradeoffs but I doubt those websites were free.  There is a lot to be thought about to get the effect you want without suiciding your SEO.

Here are some things to think about:

• Lots of what you communicate in your Flash website will not be readable by the search engine.
• Lots of what you communicate will not be available to the visually impaired.
• It takes a bit of thought, but there are usually ways to achieve the effects you are looking for without designing the site in Flash.
• You can still use Flash to add animated effects and video without main blocks of content being in Flash.  Or you can use a javascript framework like jQuery to get many of the same effects.
• If your whole site is in Flash can people link to individual pages?  Can they share your content?  Tweet it?  Like it on Facebook?
• There are things you can do to increase the SEO value of Flash content but there are still better ways to do things.  Why band-aid a bad solution when you could just do it right instead?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 at 11:55 am and is filed under SEO Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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