Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

“There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,
And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay”.
Lines from “The Volunteer” by Elbridge Cutler, 1831–1870.

Triumph and dismay are two feelings Flash designers know well. The triumph comes with mastering a rich diversity of features in a difficult technology and producing a visually appealing result. The dismay comes when the SEO wants to remove the Flash components from the website they have just designed!

Initially a simple tool for delivering low bandwidth animations over the Web Flash has evolved into a platform for delivering complex applications and rich media content. Now Flash is able to deliver far more than animations or short video clips.

Flash has become the delivery mechanism of choice for educational and complex business applications. Universities use Flash to great effect for delivering entire lectures with quizzes and assessments in real-time. In commerce Flash is used for everything from cattle auctions to virtual laboratory experiments.

However its use on websites has declined and there are two reasons for this. Firstly every usability study ever done shows that web surfers dislike Flash intensely, particularly Flash intros. Secondly Flash is a visual experience and search engine robots are blind, which means the SEO of Flash sites is problematical. Sites designed around Flash or with Flash intros and Flash navigation are often developed at the request of clients who do not know any better and the developers have not sought to educate them.

Take for example the following site that is completely built in Flash. Although there are several pages of information, because the navigation and the content are all in Flash the search engines are only aware of one page. Here it is in a reduced size window.

This site cannot even be found for the organization’s name and might just as well not exist. Flash enthusiasts might claim that this is just a poor implementation and that it is possible to optimize Flash sites. It is true that there are a variety of methods used to optimize Flash sites and these include placing the Flash inside invisible framesets or using invisible layers in Cascading CSS to present content to the search engines. Macromedia even have Search Engine SDK but in reality none of these methods is entirely effective. Sometimes you will even see a Flash site duplicated with an HTML version for the search engines but the bottom line is, why bother with the Flash site at all if users don’t like them.

Flash can be used effectively on websites to demonstrate products or a software walk through. Here is an interactive product demo for a booster seat (again in a reduced size window):

However although this may be (or maybe not) effective as a product demo it does nothing for the search engines. If used it should be placed on a normally optimized page and not considered as a replacement for text. Even then whether something like this is worth spending time and money on is a mute point.

Update July 31, 2007

Google’s Webmaster Central blog has a post by Mark Berghausen from the Search Quality Team on the Best uses of Flash.