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Flash Definition: multimedia animation technology developed by Macromedia to allow interactivity to fit in a relatively small file size.
A lot of people know about ethical search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps websites to achieve top ranked positions in the major search engines. But, not many SEO companies have the know-how or the resources to optimize Flash Animations for the search engines.
Your flash animations may be impressive, but the truth behind flash, is that it will make your website invisible to the major search engines unless it is properly optimized by Flash Animation experts.
Picture this situation- Your web site design firm has just completed a beautiful, functional site designed in flash. The animation in your site navigation is much more attractive, flows smoother, and downloads more quickly than the animated gif's used in your previous website. Now, you are ready to launch your site and promote it in the search engines.
Since crawler-based search engines spiders were primarily designed to index HTML text, web sites built with flash may be difficult or impossible for crawlers to read. However, fast search, which is the search engine powering AlltheWeb.com and Lycos.com, recently announced that it is indexing sites using flash.
Fast is the first web search engine to support the flash file format using the Macromedia SDK. This enhancement makes both the text and the links within the flash file visible to the crawler.
Google is another search engine that can, at least partially, index Flash sites. Google has the ability to extract links from flash files and read sdk extracted files.
Let's go back to our hypothetical flash web site. Three months after submitting your flash site to the search engines, it is nowhere to be found except for the pay-per-click programs available at Overture and Google. Both Google and FAST Search said that they crawl flash sites. So, why isn't your flash site easily found in these search engines?
The search engine listings arena has never been more competitive and crowded. Any site concerned with search engine traffic should have an integrated search engine optimization / search engine marketing plan in place from inception, especially flash sites, with their inherently unique structural challenges to search engine spiders.
Here are a number of guidelines for sites designed in flash.
- Question the wisdom in building an expensive flash site that will deliver next to zero search-engine marketing benefits. Building both a flash and HTML version of your site can help with search engine visibility since the major search engines should be able to crawl the HTML version of your site.
- Factor the search engine optimization (SEO) budget into the Flash site budget. Flash sites might be at a higher price since not every SEO company has an FSEO guy (Flash Search Engine Optimization).
- Think flash movies, not Flash sites. A site built in HTML, with flash movies placed inside of the HTML documents, can also have the b visual impact for your target audience to see.
There are some search engine tricks for promoting flash sites, such as placing them inside of invisible framesets and using invisible layers in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to present content to the search engines. But this is risky and your site could be penalized.
Look for an SEO company with Macromedia SDK License. The majority of site designers or search engine optimization companies are not aware of the problem or the solutions for marketing a flash site.
Erick Zegeer
COO
Phone: 203.907.3209
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