Can Flash be Optimized for the Search Engines

Optimizing Flash for the Search Engines – Can it be Done?

Yes, it can be done, although not easily. Yes it will cost you, tremendously. Get out your checkbook.

Since it’s inception Flash has been the popular medium of choice for cutting edge, hip web design. Yes, it looks cool and given a you have a really good designer, you may even end up with a very functional and intuitive Flash website. I will not deny that I myself, back in the beginning, was easily seduced by the Flash website. I was amazed at the movement and the presentation, that was in the beginning. Now I view Flash as more of an annoyance. Flash designers like to make you wait to unravel their presentation, and often times will hide the buttons, making it a treasure hunt to find the contact page.

Is it necessary? Not usually, but I have had clients set in stone about designing their site in Flash. Compromising practicality and marketability for a really nifty button that makes a cool sound when you click it. After the dust settles and the website is done, most business people come back to their senses and want their site to be optimized and marketable. There are SEO marketers who may take you on, but many won’t touch it, telling you it can’t be done.

My advice? I recommend a nicely marketable site optimized for the search engines with a Flash enhancement, if you must. It’s easier to market, easier to keep fresh and up to date. In the end, once you’ve seen the Flash, you’re over it. Functionality usually wins out over movement when it comes to a web page. In the end, your main objective should be getting more visitors to your site.

How Do Search Engines Index Your Site

In order to understand how to better market your site, you must understand how the Search Engines index your site.

As defined by Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now the search engines send out spiders or webcrawlers to evaluate and index your site. The Algorithmic method mentioned above is constantly evolving and changing with the sophistication of the web. In order to stay in the game, you need to be aware of the bare basics required, and keep abreast of new marketing concepts as they evolve.

The basics or good practices in SEO are as follows:

Have a keyword or keyphrase in your URL. For example, if you search on “shop wine online” you will see that the 8th listing is wineshoponline.com which has all three of the keywords we searched on.

Put your top keyword / keyphrase in your title tag – your title tag doesn’t have to make sense to your visitor, that’s what the page content is for, the higher you rank a keyword, the closer to the beginning of your title tag it should be.

Make sure the same keyword / keyphrase is in the page content on your page, and make sure the content is relevant to the keyword or keyphrase.  Density or the number of times the actual word appears on the page is not important. What is important is that it is CLEAR that the page content is about the keyword.

Text links are crucial – to send the spiders onward to the rest of your site, you will need text links. Web Spiders can’t follow graphic links, so if all your links are graphic buttons, the spiders will have nowhere to go and will leave your site, possibly without indexing it properly. Highlight the keywords in your text and have them link to other parts of your site as well. E.G. if you are selling clothing and one of your keywords is T-shirts, have this link to the T-shirts page on your site.

Create a Description Meta Tag – The search engines will index this description as their summary data on the list. If you don’t have a description tag, the spiders will index whatever content it finds, and sometimes this can hurt you. A well written description will give the humans a proper idea of what they will find on your site, which will entice them to visit.

Although these practices alone will not get you listed high in the search engines, they are a general foundation of good practices to get you on the road there. So pay attention to what your web designer is doing and make sure these basics are in place when you start your Internet marketing campaigns.