Building a site entirely in Flash can make your site almost invisible to most search engines. What’s the point in having the coolest and most cutting edge site if no one ever gets to see it? Let me make one thing clear, I love Flash. It definitely can give your website the “whoa” factor. The key is getting that “whoa” from more people, or channeling more traffic to your Flash site. How is this done? I would recommend designing your site in HTML and putting small components of Flash in your site. The components of Flash can do all the cool stuff that you want to wow your customers with and you can still have plenty of HTML to work with for SEO.

Make sure you create your navigation towards the top of your page using CSS and text, don’t use graphics if you can help it. In fact a good example of this is on lavaball.com. I used CSS to make the buttons, gradients and all. Of course the CSS gradients only work in IE, for now.

There are plug-ins for Dreamweaver that allow Flash to communicate with javascript, thus allowing you to control movies in your flash file from the html. This will allow you to build a totally SEOd navigation with CSS, and still have your Flash component/s an integral part of the navigation of the site.

With the Flash components placed strategically in the body of your webpage you will also be able to set aside plenty of room for keyword rich content. This will give the search engine spiders something to work with when determining what your site is all about. Also, make sure you start your page with html and keyword rich copy and finish your page with keyword rich copy. Place your Flash components somewhere in the middle of your html.

Doing these simple things will help your Flash enhanced site receive more traffic and more people will enjoy the “whoa” factor on your site.

• String Manipulation in Flash
• Connecting Flash to a Database by David Hickenbotham
• Planning a Good Site Development Strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 8:11 am and is filed under Content Optimization, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.