Beware of Flash

This is not an uncommon experience. A designer has created ‘what they fell like making’ rather than taking the time to find out what the client’s requirement, aims and preferences are. If thta designer had taken even 5 minutes to ask ‘What do you want the site to achieve?’ and ‘How are you going to judge the site’s success?’ They would have produced something far more suitable.

I’ve done a little bit of Flash site optimisation (with some success, but not anywhere near the results gained from an HTML site) and there are a few things that can be done:

1: Use dynamic text with the HTML option enabled in Flash and store that text in seperate files.

2: Create a Google Site Map.

3: Don’t forget to include you swf file in your google site map as well as any external content files such as the text files in item 1. Google does read a limited amount of the content of SWF files, last time I saw any specific information about it it was the text and getUrl() links, but nothing else.

4:Build up your incoming links. It is possible, if your site is really cool, that you can get good rankings without any keywords in your page (Google for ‘George Bush Google Bomb’). SPend time building up inbound links to your site from other related site and you’ll see some benefit over the long term.

5: Don’t expect miracles, gaining good search engine rankings takes time, Flash sites can often take longer.

Anyway, I hope that someone finds this information on my experiences useful.

Cheers

Keith

agreed

Another option is to offer a text only site.