SEO and Flash

22nd
SEP

Posted by Michael under Search

Flash animation was developed as a way of allowing a website to display highly complex content because it fits more of that content in a finite space, without destroying the aesthetics of the page design.

However, it’s also go itself a bad name as being impossible to integrate with SEO or even as being invisible to search engines. This isn’t necessarily the case, but if you’re opting for a Flash-based website for your business, there are issues that you need to understand before, not after, you put the site into operation.

Starting with Flash

The first thing to do is to ensure you’ve got five key areas fully integrated:
1) Content creation – how are you going to update your flash site, who will be responsible for refreshing content?
2) Copy – traditionally copywriting techniques don’t work with the clean ‘white-space’ attributes of Flash, so be sure your copy or copywriter is aligned to the Flash ideal
3) Site architecture – html based sites have a simple enough map – be sure that your Flash site is just as navigable not just for the end user, but for everybody in your company who needs to tweak the site
4) User experience – be sure your users are likely to be Flash-lovers. If you’re selling orthopaedic beds, it’s not likely that your target demographic will appreciate Flash nearly as much as if you were selling skateboards!
5) SEO – don’t abandon SEO to be ‘sorted out’ after your site is built and the content has been agreed. SEO needs to feature in the decision making process too.

One method for optimising Flash sites for SEO uses blended architecture, this means the site has search engine accessible content plus JavaScript to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. If a browser has Flash capability, the Javascript organises the page’s document object model to replace the alternative content, which has primacy, with the Flash movie. As search engine spiders don’t trigger Javascript they automatically find and indes the non-Flash content which should include: links, headings, text and images, and should be SEO optimised. Sites like the Cadbury one are blended architecture.

When to use Flash

Flash should be used for functionality – if you want to show a movie that demonstrates your product’s movement, like a stairlift or sells a personality, you need Flash, but if your content, offer or benefits is static – like a shopfront or a photographic model whose appearance is generally frozen in a photograph, you don’t necessarily need Flash.

Guidelines on alternative content

If you’re using a blended architecture site, you have to ensure that the text items are absolutely the same as the Flash ones, or it can be seen as spamming and your URL may end up blacklisted. Using alternative rich systems like Adobe to reflect the content of a slideshow or film is not spamming, in fact it’s recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative which says that multimedia content should have an alternative representation available to ensure all web users have equal access to all information.

Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Flash

• Where possible, embed your Flash into html pages so the page is found immediately by spiders and ensure that your html content is an exact representation of the Flash content
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using no-embed tags
• Consider breaking down any large flash files into smaller ones so that you can create more content for your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) if you have one flash and one html-based page to reflect it, your site may look thin to search engines. Deconstructing it to create various html pages, each about different concepts in the Flash page, can give you added richness.

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