A question we often get asked by many prospective and current clients is the impact of flash on how well your site gets indexed, understood and therefore ranked by the major search engines. Although we do not have the definitive answers, we can look at some of the issues and possible work arounds if you are desperate to just have a flash based website.
Back in 2008, Google and Adobe released the news that Google had developed its algorithm to be able to better spider, index and rank flash based sites. You can view the blog post by clicking on the link below:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html
Although this was undoubtedly good news for webmasters and developers who wanted to have flash based sites, it still really only affected the ability to be able to pick the text from the page, as videos, animations and other graphical elements would still be almost impossible for Google to accurately deal with.
When sitting down with a client who wants a flashed based site, we always stress that it will be harder for any SEO work to be carried out on the site, and that we would prefer to offer an html version of the website as well. This works well for both the engines and the client, because it is still important to remember that not everyone likes flash sites and indeed, some corporate companies and businesses actively block flash from their systems, so would render the website useless.
By having a landing page which is not flash based and offering the option of using a flash site or an html version of the site is in our opinion the way to go. This means you can make the landing page content rich and keyword efficient, which will allow a better indexing of your site, and therefore still offer the users the chance to view your flash site but at the same time give easy access to the engines for your html site.
It is fair to say the non flash sites are more accurately indexed perform better when we look at the rankings and results, because the major engines can understand a “normal” site much more effectively than a flash based website. It is important to remember that technology keeps evolving and changing, so this might not be the case forever, but at the moment it is much harder to get a flash based website to perform as well as a html or normally coded website.
If you did not want two versions of your website, you could still achieve very good SEO results by concentrating on off site SEO. This can consist of:
• Link Building – Using one way back links, with the keywords you want to rank for as the title of the link is probably one of the best things to concentrate on.
• Press Releases – Releasing press releases to paid and free press release sites, consisting of your main keywords title and content can help drive traffic to your site and help rank for keywords that you might be struggling for. Many press release sites also offer a back link on the release as well.
• Article Submission - Releasing well written articles to paid and free article directories and sites, consisting of your main keywords title and content can help drive traffic to your site and help rank for keywords that you might be struggling for. Many article sites also offer a back link on the release as well.
• Social Bookmarking – The majority of social bookmarking sites allow you to publishing links to your sites and also content as well. This means you can use this as not only a traffic driving measure, but also as a link building exercise as well.
Whether you decide to change your mind about developing a flash only site or decide to stick to what you really want, it really is a case of what option you feel is best. On one hand, flash based sites can look amazing, but on the other, if you struggle to get decent SEO behind the site, will anyone really ever see it? Although flash can be an excellent addition to a website, basing your whole site on flash is a massive decision, and one that should not be taken lightly.
