Full Flash website bad for ROI

Flash gets a bad rap, undeserved in my opinion, for harming search engine visibility. Why are search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners concerned about Flash, and how can we SEO Flash content? Flash content is often heavy on images and interactive features, and light on text. As of 2008, the leading search engines are heavily dependant on text to understand the meaning of pages.

Flash animation is a great way to present complex content because it allows the designer to put more content in a finite space, without wrecking page design. For technology sites, Flash is an ideal way to present a slide show or movie explaining a complex product. At the other end of the spectrum, art and entertainment sites have a real need for multimedia, and Flash is the perfect solution.

When using Flash, we’d like to satisfy each of these objectives:

* Clean design
* Search Engine Optimization
* Accessibility for a wide variety of browsers, including screen readers and mobile phones
* Code validation and standards compliance
* Correct functionality with IE

A site built entirely with Flash suffers a great disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash “page,” and install the Flash movie on each and every one of the HTML pages. When a visitor requests the page, they’ll see Flash if they can handle it. Otherwise, a non-Flash visitor, such as a search engine, will be able to spider the site. If a user follows a search result onto one of the inner pages, they’ll get the same Flash experience because the movie is available on every page. Another approach is to divide the Flash into pieces and put the relevant piece on each page.

Slicing up the Flash can result in page transitions that don’t provide the seamless effect that you want to create. To get the best of both worlds, pass a parameter into the Flash movie using FlashVars. The same movie can appear on each HTML page, but depending on the parameter value, the movie can start at an appropriate point to show the Flash content that corresponds to that page. To get rid of all the extra pages, but still be able to reference different parts of the Flash piece, add a # and a tag to the end of each URL, and pass that tag into the Flash. This approach can make the back and forward buttons work properly, and allow people to bookmark specific parts of the Flash site.

It is also possible to use PHP scripts to pull both the primary HTML content, and the Flash content from a MySQL database. This approach would greatly simplify the maintenance of an accessible Flash site by storing only one representation of the content.

[Source from http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml by by Jonathan Hochman]

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