Search Engine Optimization

Avoid Creating 100% Flash Animated Websites

Adobe flash animation is the best way to present smooth, flowing, animated graphics. The design capabilities are vast, and there are many ways to produce stunning graphics, combining audio, to create a compelling video presentation. And, it's very easy to get carried away, deciding to do away with conventional wisdom, and opt to build a website purely from flash animation. Bad idea.

While the affects of video and animation can be compelling to a human visitor, the same is not true for a robotic visitor. A human reviewer may be thoroughly impressed, which is indeed what you want to accomplish in building a website. However, a robot, or crawler, will find your site homely and unimpressive, thus ranking your site near the bottom, if at all, in search results. This is largely due to the fact robots crawl web pages for text, because they can't see the affects of video and animation, unable to relate a person's search query to your website.

Adobe has been working with the likes of Google and Microsoft, to develop methods in which search engines can crawl the text found inside flash animated videos. However, this is difficult to accomplish for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is, not every flash animation has been created using the methods that Adobe employs.

There is software, cheaper alternatives to buying the very expensive Adobe Flash Professional Suite, that are capable of producing flash animated files, but without the exact structure of a true Adobe flash document. And, there is simply no way to counter those problems other than to suggest designers only use Adobe to create flash documents, which may not be practical given the expense.

Another problem, related to reading a flash document, is some developers rely on a higher blend of graphics, and not text, to present video animation, such as pictures, or embedding another video, produced in a different video format. In other words, there is not a high likelihood, or guarantee, of a search engine successfully reading your flash animation.

What Am I Suppose To Do With My Flash Website ?

There are basically two ways to convert a 100% flash website, to a more indexable site with search engines:

1. The HTML <NOSCRIPT> Tag

After every instance in which flash animation has been deployed inside an HTML page, a noscript tag should immediately follow the output. This is assuming you have inserted the flash animation using the swfobject or using another client-side scripting resource.

While the noscript HTML tag is not evaluated the same as other HTML tags, it does provide some text and alternate content robots can use to help determine your rank in search results. All of the content found in between the noscript tag identifiers is crawled and applied as keyword credit to your domain. However, because this content is not guaranteed to be available to all visitors, search engines will not place a high level of relevance on what is found.

Of course, every designer wants the words found on their site, to have some high level of relevance in order to attract searchers. While the noscript tag offers some relevance it's not suited to replace, or equal, the value of an entire website. However, this tag is easy to implement inside a web document, which suits the beginner, and you can control the scope or depth of the content without much difficulty.

The noscript tag should always be used an alternative, when implementing client-side scripting, not only for search engines, but your visitors too. Because of the security risks, client-side script languages such as Javascript can present, a considerable, while not significant, amount of visitors will disable client-side scripting in their web browser. And, if a visitor cannot view your site as securely as they'd prefer, they will likely choose to avoid your site and move on to another one.

2. Alternative Content

The best way to enhance your current flash website is to include a link that will essentially display an HTML version of your flash site, located in another area of your domain.

This link could easily be displayed at the bottom, or top, of your flash page, and should have an accompanying message that states the presence of an alternative to viewing the flash website. This one link, on the home page of your domain, will not only serve your visitors well, but search engines will follow and crawl it, resulting in the ranking of your site higher in search results.

How much higher in search results ? It will depend largely on how much unique, relevant content, is found crawling the home page link, and any subsequent links a crawler finds and indexes. Because flash is so widely used, and has few, if any, security problems, related to its use, you'll find the majority of your visitors will prefer the use of the flash site, while the opposite will be true of robotic visitors.