Using Flash in your website is an interesting way to attract readers. There is nothing better than looking at a webpage that is nicely decorated with good color combinations, good content positions, visible links and animated interface. Giving information in an attractive way is likely to give your readers a few things to revisit your site in the future.
Flash-based websites are becoming more important and popular on the Internet. Sadly, Flash websites are not exactly SEO-friendly. Although there has been recent news about Google improving the crawling and indexing of Flash content, it is still a good rule of thumb not to go overboard when it comes to developing flash websites, and stick to the classic rules of search engine crawlability.
Search engines like Google have gotten a lot better at reading Flash files than they were in the past. In fact, the content of a site written primarily in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash used to be invisible to a search engine. Although Google is much better at reading and indexing Flash content, most people in the SEO world will still recommend having an HTML-style navigation and content template.
Below are some of what Flash can not do:
Text
In theory if more of your content is being crawled then the more phrases and words you can be relevant for, except without some clever programming the text is going to be unstructured and under-optimized. However, you can make it able to be crawled, but the chance and the possibilities for it to be crawled properly is time consuming, thus making it not at all practical and clever.
Links
In a pure Flash site, even with clever programming, your content may sit in clearly defined sections but your off page linking campaigns can’t link directly to the content. Flash sites inherently sit on just one URL, so focusing on one keyword for a specific section of content isn’t possible, resulting in the dilution of your anchor text’s keywords from links.
If Flash is embed to PHP, it is possible overcome this problem.
Site Architecture
Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if a web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed. Google does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by a Flash files. If a Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF Icon file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in the Flash file.
One of the most common issues for websites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Websites made entirely with Flash is one of the problem. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.
Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer exciting user experience but they are less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers.