DESIGNING WITH FLASH

Be careful when Designing with Flash or building your site with Flash.  There I said it.  Flash is by far the most attractive way to show your site on the web.  It has movement, sounds, and can do things that static html just simply cannot do.

Flash, however, is virtually invisible to the Search Engines with regard to content.  Flash is basically an interactive movie or set of pictures formatted to work on the www.  Think about this.  I could create a picture of myself and Brad Pitt.  Since I have never met Brad, I would have to create it in Photoshop.  Once created, I could show it to 100 people.  Since I don't really look like him, I imagine that all 100 people would be able to pick out who he is in the picture.

But, I could take that same picture, scan it into my computer and name it "picture-1.jpg."  I could put it on my website and leave it there for 10 years.  Would Google, Yahoo!, or MSN know that Brad was even in the picture?  Nope.  It would not be possible for a computer to have any clue that he was there.  I would have to name the picture "brad-pitt.jpg" or similar for the computers over at the Search Engines to know that he was even in it.  Even if I hand wrote in huge black ink on my picture "this is Brad Pitt" and then scanned it into my computer and put it on my website.  The search engines would still not know and they would not be able to read the writing I put on the picture. 

All they would know is that it is a picture and it is 300px wide and 300px tall named "picture-1.jpg."

This is a simplified explanation to illustrate the point that Flash, being just pictures, really has no way of transmitting its content to the Search Engines.  All the search engines can see is that there are some pictures (Flash is really video, but same problems) on the site.

Some answers

There are three ways that I have thought of to design with Flash that won't hurt your search engine rankings.

1. Design a parallel site in html.  If you are designing with Flash but still want to be found by the Search Engines, then you will need to do double the work by designing a parallel html site.  Be sure to have an html based link on your home page leading visitors and Search Engine Spiders to your html site.
2. Only use Flash objects.  Design your site with html and only put Flash in the header, or on a slideshow or etc.  Don't design your entire site with Flash.
3. Build an html site and don't use Flash at all.  This, by far, is the most effective way to build your site.  Search Engines have no problem with the web-standard html.