Stay Away From Flash Content on Your Website
If at all possible, you should stay away from flash content on your website. There are two problems with flash content, search engines can’t index the content and the pages are slow to load. Nothings more annoying for a new visitor to your website than to have to wait to get to the actual content…. Just show the content!
Google SEO also advises in their webmaster information that flash sites may not be able to crawled by search engine robots.
Think about it, a new customer goes to your website and has to wait a minute or two to see a fancy animation of your logo, why? If you’re going to put flash movies on your web pages, make sure they have great content… and that your visitors will find extremely valuable.
If you do have flash content, you’ll need to supplement this graphical content with additional text content which is indexable by the search engine bots. Here are some best practices that should be followed:
- Include content above your Flash movie with the movie title with you page keyword.
- Include a brief description of the movie below the movie, include your page keyword.
- You should provide the same content in text form for search engines on a separate page.
- To ensure proper functionality, your page code should automatically detect the flash player on their computer and the version. Prompt them for the latest if it’s not the current version.
- Give users the option to “skip introduction” and not watch your flash movie. Retuning visitors will really appreciate yes.
Again it’s best to not use flash content on you website. It’s probably quicker and easier to just build a duplicate site without Flash. That way you can make sure your web site visitors and the search engines can access your web site content.
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