Flash content for your website

If you are not aware, flash content does terribly in search engines. Does this mean that you shouldn't use flash on your site? Absolutely not! It simply means that you have to plan your site carefully if you want to use flash and remain competitive in the search engines.

Before continuing, let me first tell you that I am personally a big fan of flash. There is a lot of cool and meaningful things that can be done with it, which is why it is so popular with web developers. If there were no such thing as search engines I would probably use it exclusively if only for the reason that you can control the look and feel of the website no matter what kind of browser you view it in. Unfortunately there are search engines, and at the time of this writing this technology hasn't mastered indexing content within a flash application.

To fix this problem I recommend developing a site that uses a combination of flash and HTML. As you may have noticed, this technique has been used in the CMS Geeks site. If you look closely you can see that flash is primarily used for the header. Links within the header are duplicated in html throughout the site so search engines can find those pages. Ideally, the text links would be at the top where the header is, as search engines like this better but we are willing to take the hit for the sake of design.

If you try to create a site totally in flash don't expect it to be placed well in the search engines. If you still need to have your site done completely in flash but want to have your content spidered then you may want to try using an html splash/entry page that allows a user to view either an html or flash version of your site by providing an html link to each. This of course means that you will have to invest the effort and/or money to make two versions of your site.

The scenarios and solutions mentioned in this article address only the most common situations that I have come across in the past. Your particular needs may vary and require a different approach. Ultimately your site goals should determine when and how you use flash in it.