View Full Version : Flash and SEO


wyrickj
06-22-2004, 02:37 PM
Keep your site Simple



Every day I see some type of multimedia element on a page ether it would be Flash, Animated GIF, etc. As you may already know that Search Engines have a hard time crawling dynamic media such as Flash because when they were designed to crawl pages they where designed to crawl simple websites not a Flash Media site. Google will crawl your site if your site does contain Flash elements but if you have all Flash website and NO body text your rankings in a search engine will be dead no matter if you have a PR 0 or a PR 10 site. In this case the On-Page SEO factors come into place.

Customer’s choice – Flash vs. Simple Websites, well take a guess on what they wanted:

• Only 20% of respondents would visit a site more often if it had rich media enhancements.
• 40% of respondents would visit a site more often if the pages would load faster.
• 59% of retail shoppers wanted more product information (and yes, this means more text on the page).


So if you were thinking of building an all Flash site well studies show that customers want more information vs. Sweet Looking Flash Media sites.

Disadvantages of building an all Flash Site:

• Takes a lot longer to build especially if you are looking for a scripted flash site using Flash’s ActionScript language.
• Takes more SEO effort and power
• Reduced Rankings major (Example 2advanced.com)
• Your ROI (Return on Investment) will decrease because your not ranking


Pure Flash with Backlinks and On-Page SEO = Oh My is this hard: As almost everyone should know that backlinks are a critical step you need to gain that high PR and gain a totally high ranking in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages.) The problem with pure flash is search engines do not read text in a Flash SWF file like they would in an HTML file.

As almost every SEO Expert out there including myself have knowledge about pure flash sites and Google ranking problems there are steps you can take to get your pure flash site on the Top 10 results. For a more reasonable situation I will list some types of setup you can do to include your dream flash website you want to release.

Recommended Way:

Build that simple site not only to gain a great ranking but to gain more customers that want more information instead of pure flash. Use this site for any major search engine as all search engines have problems in indexing pure flash sites.

Then build that dream pure flash site for the people that want top of the line multimedia websites. Or another way is to totally skip designing the dream pure flash site.


Some question to ask yourself before you go with a "All Flash Site"

Think of a Link Strategy. How are you going to distribute that PR (Page Rank) through out your site?

What about the important On-Page SEO stuff. Anchor Links, Keywords in your text / product descriptions / etc.

How is Google going to crawl you? What kind of links are you going to have?


Ask yourself the questions above to come up with a plan of what you need to do.


In my personal view I would take the Recommended Way because it’s easier on me and I will make more money quicker. There are so many other reasons why to go with my way vs. the very harsh way.

jlknauff
07-26-2004, 05:00 AM
Flash is a tool, nothing more. Most people don't understand it. They think if they build a site out of flash it will instantly make it better somehow. In fact, I have a feed back form on my site and the response that I got from one person was "for a more compelling site use flash." Hmmm, well then maybe we should start writting aricles in flash for more compeling writing too :rolleyes: Nowadays with CSS you can accomplish the same layout controll as you can with flash. My pure HTML/CSS pages will appear the same on ALL resolutions and the will dominate ANY flash site in the SERPs. You should use flash where it will add to the visitors experience but IMO you should NEVER use it to make a site.

The index of this site www.seo-guy.com is a perfect example of how to use flash as elements to a site vs as the site.

If nothing else, you all should consider this-you are at this forum to learn to improve your SEO, flash will kill that.

wyrickj
07-26-2004, 10:47 AM
It depends on the market you want a full flash site too. I am waiting for the next Visual Studio.NET product line (2005) so I can start building more mean and lean web applications. Anyways I build pure flash sites but I also make a dialup friendly version for of course dialup users and the search engines.

clasione
07-27-2004, 06:13 PM
Flash definetly has it's advantages and disadvantages....

You'd figure that it looks better, but does it cost you in the long run....

How many visitors can actually view flash?

Do we have any idea...

The ones on slow connections and/or can't view are definetly website leavers....

wyrickj
07-27-2004, 08:09 PM
Correct you are Clasione. Lot of Web Designers out there still use Flash 5 or MX so it really would not be a compatiblity problem as publishers can choose what version of the Flash Player they want to publish for. I am the person who likes to take advantage of new Flash Player features so I do publish for Player 7 but I am sure 40% or more people have the latest version of flash player installed.

jlknauff
07-29-2004, 04:27 AM
[QUOTE=clasione]How many visitors can actually view flash?

Do we have any idea...

[/QUOTE]

I would say it should be higher than most would think. Flash player is included as far back as windows 98 (Flash 4 I belive) so you should be good to go for most.

eCommando
07-29-2004, 12:26 PM
I think # of browsers with flash installed is very high over 95%.

wyrickj
07-29-2004, 12:48 PM
Lets see the correct answer is around 98% of browsers have Flash installed. I was researching and found it on Macromedia.com

jlknauff
11-30-2004, 01:03 PM
Did it break down the % of each version?

Kadence
01-14-2005, 02:54 AM
98%? Wow. I would've thought it would be like 80% or something.

madmonk
02-09-2005, 09:27 PM
great posts guys. very interesting..

seokeywords
02-25-2005, 02:03 PM
I run over 300 content sites in my network, many are ranked on page one for their topic. We find MM works best 'inside' the site, get the people interested on a simple easy to index front door and amaze them inside with wmv, swf, or whatever you want

You lose SE's and customers with flash or animated front doors