The Flash website and SEO consequences
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Are you about to embark upon the new and exciting journey of getting your website done, redone or undone. Are you hoping to avoid the latter? You want style, you want usability, functionality, reliability and aesthetic quality….right? Let me guess..on a budget ? You may be considering flash, and why not, flash makes websites look ‘flashy’; amazing animations, cool effects and funky navigation. No match for regular dynamic ASP, PHP or HTML website right? But what about the search engine side?…
Styling Regular websites
Speaking SEO wise an HTML website is the best for bots and readability. However, many dynamic, CMS based websites are almost as search engine friendly as static sites, and the usability and functionality they offer is unsurpassed. A nice flash header, background animation and javascript often prove to be more viable options in aesthetic quality than FLASH built websites. Of course, if money is no issue whiz computer experts can integrate FLASH and dynamic code.
The advantage of conventional websites
Flash websites are often read as a single page by the search engines. Whilst you may have laboured tirelessly to provide quality content, you will not reap the search engine benefits of this toil as bots are not able to read into .swf files and only view your site as a single graphic. As a result, a 50 page website is turned into 1 page. This means less internal linkage and any changes made to content are not indexed. Whilst dynamic and HTML websites clearly show each page as a separate entity within your URL, and any changes made to content attract the Google bot and others to return more frequently to your site, thereby contributing to higher rankings.
Optimizing Flash
All is not lost with FLASH however, if you insist on travelling ‘the road less travelled’, however, be prepared to spend extra money on optimization. For an SEO, it is definitely no easy task to optimize FLASH. It involves aggressive meta data entry, clever CSS tricks and some semi white hat div tag tricks. But a proficient SEO will tell you that you need to build a dynamic website around your existing FLASH one and place all of your written content there. Effectively this provides an access point for bots and spiders to crawl the content and increases the size of your site generally (which is always a positive).
Optimizing FLASH takes a significant investment into SEO services as it involves virtually generating a whole new website to complement your existing one. You can save yourself the expense and trouble by simply going with a hybrid model.
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