Optimising websites that are Flash based

There is no doubt that Flash is a great technology to include sound and images on a page and increase the interactivity of web sites. But even after many years, it is still an issue as far as SEO is concerned, as search engines still cannot easily index all of the contents of Flash files.

Search engines cannot read all of the content within Flash files because they are too difficult to index fully.? Spiders cannot index Flash files the same way as they do with html files, instead they can only really index filenames and some text based content within the Flash files.

As a general rule one should keep the use of Flash to a minimum, and definitely avoid Flash menus. However, if you are unfortunate enough to have a site entirely in flash, then there are a couple of steps you should take if you have a flash only site:

• Add metadata to all Flash files that you use/create.
• Provide alternative pages that are Flash free but replicate the same information.

Ideally though, you should only have pages on your site that don’t require Flash for the page to work. It is bad from both an SEO perspective and an accessibility one to require Flash to view a web page. As well as this, there can be usability issues due to the fact that Flash does not require the same of structure and layout as standard web pages, which can confuse people.

Nadeem Hussain
SEO Programmer

Listen to this podcast

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post
TrackBack URI

Leave a comment