SEOLink Resources

To achieve desired results with elements of both Flash & SEO, most of the companies refurbish thier websites. Text is harder for spiders to decipher with a site built in Flash where there is only one potential entry page, and the actual content on pages is lessened. The combination of Flash and SEO is like oil and water - that are individually useful but hard to mix. Many of people are planning to refurbish their sites with Flash where they have already generated tremendous gains in their sales using SEO. A site built entirely in Flash still faces huge obstacles where many companies hires experienced “Flash designers” to take their websites to the “next level”.

To index the content from combined Flash/SEO sites, many recent moves from Google and Yahoo! were made to try. But those moves haven’t brought successful SEO results compared to html sites. You need to understand the difference between embedded Flash and sites built entirely using Flash. As for example, a site contains basic html with Flash elements will not suffer much, as the Flash element that is usually a movie in a box on the homepage or elsewhere, is externalized.

A search engine spider will index the code that is readily apparent on the source page and will not try to parse through any files that have been externalized. There are major issues with sites that are built entirely in Flash from an SEO results perspective.

It is said that, for a search engine, every page of your site is a potential entry page. SEO suffers even more with a site built in Flash, as there is only one potential entry page, and that is the main URL. This cuts off hundreds of potential pages that could be indexed in Google or Yahoo or other engines. It is very difficult to target a wide collection of key phrases when the only potential entry page in search engine listings is home page, and that potentially eliminate SEO results or rankings. Search engines rank pages based upon a number of criteria where content is a very large one. The text that they can “understand” on individual pages is one of the most important to SEO results. Primarily, search engines read html text. So using a rare and fancy font that must be displayed in graphic form might not be available on visitors computer. As a result of this, the engine will not read the text and therefore it will be unknown what the page is about, which could harm SEO results. Any text included in Flash is also included. Yahoo and Google have recently announced enhanced capabilities in reading content within Flash.

Mobile devices can be incapable of displaying Flash content, although “Flash Lite” may change this. People who seek information on a mobile device wants to navigate through Flash. They want to get information that they seek from a fast-loading html page. To target mobile audience, html content will be at a premium. Many different opinions can be found on mixing Flash and SEO on the internet. The taget is to, for the sites entirely built in Flash, rank well in SEO results for 50+ competitive terms for those that are related to the specific business.

Although Flash and SEO don’t mix well, but they are obviously individually useful. Until they do, sites should be built entirely out of Flash - or have an alternate html option for user preference purposes and search engines.