Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Are you laying the groundwork with a designer to develop a new Web site for your company? Here’s a suggestion: ask the designer to use flash items sparingly. Granted most designers find animation and graphics to be an integral part of a nice looking Web site, but an overabundance of flash can hinder your site’s search engine optimization efforts.

You just can’t imagine what a disadvantage flash is with search engines – it is a top rankings killer! Although search engines are being able to index content inside a flash animation, keep your important information away from flash animation. A search engine may simply ignore the animation altogether.

Further complicating matters is the fact that your visitors may not be able to view your flash content. Your site must make accommodations to provide alternative content for when flash does not load properly. Other problems may arise as a result of using flash. Visitors will use their Web browser back button when viewing a flash animation to try to return to the Home page, but this process reloads the entire animation. There are many usability problems like this. A designer needs to keep these in mind when building a flash interface.

Ideally, your site content should open within 15 seconds. While flash can do a lot for your Web site’s presentation, from the SEO point of view it should be used sparingly – or not at all. If you must use flash, use it only on non-crucial content pages (http://www.blue2.com/art-03.htm).

Contact ATXWEBMASTERS in Cleveland, Ohio for more information on web design, ecommerce, email marketing, and of course, search engine optimization.

Tags: design, flash, search engine optimization, seo, top rankings

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under SEO Discussions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.