Search Engine Optimization and Flash
Posted by Rourke Mitchell | Posted in Web Development | Posted on 27-12-2010
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Many web pages nowadays are decorated with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology will allow, in a very easy manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your webpages. Of course, these animations have some effect on the way your site is “seen” and indexed by the search engines. The challenge of Flash Search Engine Optimization arises, which is a serious issue in terms of conversion and web site earnings.
What Are Flash Animations?
When you produce an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The “.fla” represents the Flash format extension. For you to display this file in a web page, you need to export it in Shockwave Format (extension .swf). It is this file, once exported, that you’ll be employing for your web site. Almost any text which you include in the animation possibly won’t be indexed by the search engine as they rarely give attention to these formats. Regardless of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that can read the text in these animations. This means that any site or webpage which is constructed entirely in Flash will be invisible to the search engines which index only text content in html format.
Why Use Flash for Sites?
Because of the minimal content included on sites constructed entirely in Flash search engines may have problems indexing them and will therefore evade these websites. Moreover spiders are not abIe to read the content of a .swf file. Some webmasters use flash to build mini-sties for specific campaign sites. Here are a couple of reasons people find Flash worth the effort.
The influence of animation is maximized with flash which improves the web’s interactive and aesthetic environment. It could be blended effectively with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). Therefore , it is quite possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros
It makes it possible for the designer to put more content in a small-sized space with no damage to the layout. It’s an easier approach to present slide shows or movies. Flash is ideal for producing banners, ads and flash videos. For creating visual impact and pulling the eye to distinct points of interest on a website Flash is the tool of choice.
Cons
Sites utilizing flash might take time to load also it boosts bandwidth consumption. Many search engines dislike and don’t index Flash. You may be at the mercy of the Flash developers – if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won’t be able to make any kind of alterations and you’ll have to pay them for adjustments The “Back” button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google’s AdWords won’t approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this should you decide to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash may interrupt the visitor’s experience on the website. For example, never ending movies and sounds without volume control may drive some site visitors away.
Splash Pages don’t favor your presence – they don’t have the text which contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products.
It is not always easy to optimize flash for the capricious search engines. The amount of time and energy it takes for Seo for Flash websites is far greater compared to work needed for an HTML site.
When you need more information about flash components or you want to get some flash components, don’t forget to read my previous articles.
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