In the past you might have heard search engine optimisation engineers say things like, “flash is evil” and alike. My personal opinion is that the goal of every search engine optimisation specialist is to improve the quantity and quality of website traffic and visitors without degrading the value the website has in presenting its image. In other words, don’t sacrifice the design for the sake of SEO. Conversely, it should be said that we should never sacrifice the SEO for the sake of the design. There is a happy medium where SEO and flash design work together to present a clean and professional image while still having brand exposure within the search results.

While there have been recent advancements by Google in optical recognition technology and analysing the content of flash, at no stage in the next 2 years will Google rank these kinds of websites near the top of the search results for highly competitive terms.

While flash can be pretty and nice, at this point it is still not indexed or readable by search engines as they cannot interpret images or text content within an image.

So, if you were to ask an online marketing consultant then there is no way that they would suggest building a flash only website and just hoping and praying for visitors.

Q: So, where is the happy medium between SEO and flash?

A: Clearly somewhere in the middle! To better define the requirements from an SEO point of view then a site which has 500-800 words of text per page, heading tags including H1 and a couple of H2 tags per page. Coupled with that all of this text content must be in plain HTML text and readable in source code or without styling.

Best practice use of flash within an SEO friendly website is being used within high impact areas that are designed to capture the attention of the intended audience, but it is used sparingly. It is important to ensure that as much text content is available on the webpage and in simple HTML.

For more information on how to design, build and market your website online, please contact Chris Diprose from DT Digital.