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April 06 ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

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Introductory comments

My apologies for missing so many newsletters the last few months. My brother lost his battle with cancer in October. Though it was expected, it did not hurt any less to lose the most important person in my life. And on top of that, I have been sick quite a bit. But I hope I am on the mend. On to the question:

Question of the month

Question: I am redoing a Flash site because it is not getting any search engine rankings. I am also emailing with a potential client about why her Flash site is not ranking on Google. Here is what I found out:

Answer: From the SEORountable.com forum (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003410.html):
What is a Flash Movie?
A flash movie, or shock wave file (SWF), is the file format published when a Flash movie is exported. A SWF file can also be exported by several other Macromedia or Adobe Products. The SWF is usually an animation, dynamic menu, or highly interactive web-based application embedded into an HTML page. Flash files, when exported correctly for the best web-based optimization, are compressed, thus making their file size lightweight. The SWF format is ideal for presenting vector-based, interactive and animated graphics with sound and video for the web. Vector images are ideal because they will not “pixilize” if stretched or compressed. Flash files can also contain text which can be animated, static or dynamically populated from external sources, such an XML file or a database. Text embedded in a Flash file, for many years, could not be read by search engines. However, recent updates by Macromedia are making this a possibility.

Problems with Flash and Search Engines

Historically, it has been difficult to get Flash content indexed and ranked by search engines. In the past, search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, did not spider Flash content as they could not read the compressed file and much of the text inside the SWF appeared as graphics to the search engines. The main page of a web site, if Flash-based, rarely ranked well, unless off-page factors such as link popularity or link reputation were sufficient enough to carry the page. Flash files that were indexed by Google, Lycos and other search engines, which did not have any text or key words associated with them in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Now you can get some rankings with a Flash site. Most work-arounds have included (see also Search Engine Optimization: Designing a Search-Friendly Site) creating a non-text site and offer it on the main page of the site. And you can add a “Site Map” link at the top of your page to allow the search engine spiders to get into your site and index it. But neither of this work overly well because the most important place on your site for rankings is the text on your main page.

Recent Clients of W-edge design:

Moonhorse Art Studio
Lash Publications
PDT Communications
Nancy Paul and Associates
Cabella Creations

Wrap up

My suggestion would be put most of your site into HTML or even PHP (spiders can crawl this and you can get decent rankings) and keep your Flash files for ways to promote your services in case studies, before and after work, or a slideshow of your creative work. Feel free to email me any questions! Thanks for reading my newsletter.

Please send all questions to theresaw@columbus.rr.com.

To see the articles from my print web column, go to http://www.w-edge.com/articles.htm

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