I recently met with a PR firm about deploying a social media campaign and helping them build some processes for clients around social media deployment. Naturally, one of the topics that came up was search engine visibility. Specifically how to make sure their clients sites were able to capitalize on the additional traffic and link boost their sites will get. As we reviewed many of the sites, I discovered that Flash was being heavily used for the site development and in many cases, the entire site was built in Flash.

Why is this bad? It’s not “bad” exactly, it just makes it difficult to highly optimize the site for search spiders. Here is why: search engine spiders can crawl a flash or video file because the content isn’t text indexed the way HTML is. Keep in mind, search engines were designed to search the vast amount of text on the web and return the documents (or html pages) that were the most relevant to that searched term. Fundamentally, Flash isn’t a text document - it’s either an application or a set of images like a video - which are invisible to search engines. These sites are beautiful, the clients love them, and both the clients and PR firm get wonderful feedback.

So is it possible to live in both worlds? Yes, somewhat. There are a few methods to make Flash work AND maintain search engine visibility.

1. Have alternate HTML versions of the site. This is a pretty tried and true method that’s been around since not all browsers could read Flash. It was important then to be able to offer a non media heavy site, and now your search engine visibility will benefit from this same option. The downside - you have to develop, or pay to develop two versions of the same site.

2. Embed Flash elements using XHTML and CSS website framework, rather than build the entire site in Flash. This also allows you to tag the Flash element so the search engine spider has something to crawl. Doing this method correctly has led to some really nice sites that perform well in organic search results.

3. Balance. For every Flash element on the page, make sure there is an equal text element elsewhere on the page that can be indexed by search engines. This may end up forcing you to make uncomfortable design decisions, so it’s not always the best option.

Hopefully Adobe and Google will tag-team a method of making Flash rich sites play nice with search spiders, but until then a good CSS designer can do some amazing stuff with static webpages that can deliver a site that is beautiful to search engines AND people.

By the way, if you can think of a catchier title - please post it in the comments.

Tags: Search Engine Visibility, search-engine, search-engines

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Search Engine Visibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.