Many web pages nowadays are embellished with flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology allows, in a very simple manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages.
Appealing as these flash animations may be they do have a huge impact on how the website is seen by the search engines. Due to the limitations of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and profitability of the website will be affected.
What Are Flash Animations?
When you create an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The ".fla" represents the Flash format extension. In order 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 will be using for your web site.
If the animation you have created contains text, it won't be taken into account by most of the search engines, as they don't pay much attention to this format. Still, there are search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text inserted in the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) that is built entirely in Flash will therefore pass almost "unseen" by search engines, which index, almost exclusively, text content in HTML format. Nevertheless, the HTML file that launches the Flash animation will be crawled by search engine's spiders.
Why Use Flash for Sites?
It is not a secret for anyone that search engines don't really like sites that are built using Flash exclusively. These sites rarely contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though every now and then for mini-sites or for campaign sites.
Here are a couple of reasons people find Flash worth the effort.
It maximizes the animation's impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment.
It can be combined successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros
More content can be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
Flash makes it easier to include slide shows and movies into a website.
It is a great tool to create banners and ads, and even Flash videos.
It's a good instrument for creating great visual impact and drawing attention to specific points of interest on a web site.
Cons
Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth and take a long time to load.
Most search engines don't like and don't index Flash.
Modifying Flash websites can be costly if you use third party developers. This is because they may code the project in such a way that it will be difficult to make changes on your own. To get your changes made you will more than likely need to pay an extra fee.
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 if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash may interrupt the visitor's experience on the site. For instance, never ending movies and sounds without volume control may drive some site visitors away.
Splash Pages don't favor your visibility - they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products.
Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of a HTML site.
Appealing as these flash animations may be they do have a huge impact on how the website is seen by the search engines. Due to the limitations of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and profitability of the website will be affected.
What Are Flash Animations?
When you create an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The ".fla" represents the Flash format extension. In order 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 will be using for your web site.
If the animation you have created contains text, it won't be taken into account by most of the search engines, as they don't pay much attention to this format. Still, there are search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text inserted in the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) that is built entirely in Flash will therefore pass almost "unseen" by search engines, which index, almost exclusively, text content in HTML format. Nevertheless, the HTML file that launches the Flash animation will be crawled by search engine's spiders.
Why Use Flash for Sites?
It is not a secret for anyone that search engines don't really like sites that are built using Flash exclusively. These sites rarely contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though every now and then for mini-sites or for campaign sites.
Here are a couple of reasons people find Flash worth the effort.
It maximizes the animation's impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment.
It can be combined successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros
More content can be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
Flash makes it easier to include slide shows and movies into a website.
It is a great tool to create banners and ads, and even Flash videos.
It's a good instrument for creating great visual impact and drawing attention to specific points of interest on a web site.
Cons
Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth and take a long time to load.
Most search engines don't like and don't index Flash.
Modifying Flash websites can be costly if you use third party developers. This is because they may code the project in such a way that it will be difficult to make changes on your own. To get your changes made you will more than likely need to pay an extra fee.
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 if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash may interrupt the visitor's experience on the site. For instance, never ending movies and sounds without volume control may drive some site visitors away.
Splash Pages don't favor your visibility - they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products.
Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of a HTML site.
