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Common Misconceptions about Use of Flash and SEO
A very common misconception regarding SEO is that Flash sites can’t rank well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). However, there are plenty of examples that say otherwise. Many years ago, this may have been rather difficult and perhaps even considered impossible but since then, many advances have been made in relation to better rankings for Flash websites.
Keep in mind though, that a website won’t rank high simply because it is 100% optimized. In the end there is no such thing as a perfectly optimized website, but the fact is that websites rank according to relevancy and popularity as well as authority in their niche. So what does that mean for Flash sites? Your focus should shift away from optimization and more towards creating a strong link profile with authority links.
The first thing we need to consider is that the indexing of Flash sites is not impossible as Google rolled out the Flash update in 2008. Aside from Google and other search engines doing everything they can to help with indexing of Flash websites there are a few things you can do to make it that much easier:0
- The first is to promote your brand and creat useful and authoritative links to your most important pages.
- Second is to make sure that all of your meta tags are in place. Meta description has no influence on rankings, but it certainly helps convert searchers into website visitors (nb. Use unique, relevant text with strong call to action). But most of all make sure that your website page titles are well optimized and include your most important keywords at a reasonable level (no spamming!)
- It is advisable to place as much plain HTML in the code as you can and link from the HTML part of the page. Regular text links with well chosen anchor text will get the job done.
- And the last thing you can do to make sure your website is ready for search engines and to break the content into several Flash files instead of a single large Flash file. This will give you the opportunity to add more HTML to your pages and have them easily optimized with relevant and appropriate text and links.
Flash allows plenty of attractive things to be added to a website, and people shouldn’t be scared to use Flash just because of its associated stigma with poor rankings in SERPs. Like everything else this just calls for some moderation. If you don’t know what you are doing, a pure Flash website may be difficult to rank at first, but far from impossible. Just follow good SEO practices and Google’s optimization guidelines along with working on your backlink portfolio for success.
It won’t be long before Google will be able to crawl and index full Flash sites just like it does with regular HTML sites.
Author Info: This post is written by Alex Petrovic, Advanced SEO strategist, from Dejan SEO company.
Even i have observed this trend. I did a small test even and found that 2 identical sites – flash and non-flash, both performed the same. Popularity also seem to be dependent on the off-page SEO effort.
I’m not a fan of flash based site. Yeah they are pretty but like you say at the end google cant crawl them yet like regular sites so its better to stick with standard xhtml and css.
I used to believe this too that flash sites do not rank well in search engine results. But after going through this post, this misconception has been cleared.
Flash-based websites can rank, but without traditional content, the process can be more complicated. Fortunately, in our experience, tried and true, good old white hat SEO will work, whether you’ve a Flash heavy site or something more traditional.
With good link building and title optimisation Flash sites can rank very well, however more of an issue with flash sites is inability to show on things like the I Pad, whose market share will grow…