Flash, SEO and Optimization - How to properly use flash on your websites

Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines. This article describes some of the considerations and recommendations when using flash on a website.

Disney does it. And so does Oprah. Even my favorite pizza place does it. That is embed their primary navigation and important content inside a flash movie. In fact in all these cases, a good part of the sites home page is flash, rendering that section of the page invisible to search engine crawlers.

Granted these are extreme cases of sites which use flash extensively, but there are other cases where even a little flash can be improperly used. There are also cases where flash is not only appropriate, it is recommended. The question then becomes how to best use flash without affecting search engine rankings.

Much like the early settlers of the Wild Wild West we are the frontiersman (and women) of a new community – the World Wide Web community (notice the WWW analogy) – which has seen its birth in the past couple decades and has really experienced its growth happen in the last 10 years or so.

And throughout that time there have been many ways to display a website and its content. Some were more successful than others. But there is one aspect of web development which has been hotly contested between designers of websites and those who position them. That is the use of Flash.

Flash has been around for some time now and while it is pretty (for lack of a better word) it can seriously hinder a websites ability to position well in the search engines. This is because most search crawlers can not see nor effectively index flash or its contents. Therefore anything contained within the flash, including page content or more importantly site navigation, is invisible to them.

Yet flash does have it’s good points as well. As I mentioned above, it can turn an otherwise bland looking site into something unique and refreshing. So the question becomes – where does one balance the need for search engine indexability with the need for impressing customers?

Well here’s a rule of thumb for you – less is better.

Less flash occupying the page is better, as well as having as little content embedded within it as possible. Further, where the flash appears on the page can have an impact on its ability to deliver the intended message.

Let’s have a quick survey – how many of you, upon coming to a site, tune out the top 1/5 of the page, and even a couple inches on the right of the page – especially if you see flashing or movement?

Just as I suspected, most of you. I do it too. And we do this because these are the places we typically see banner ads, therefore we associate that space on many sites with advertising and tune it out.

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