Normal wisdom says that if you use Flash in a web site it will
hurt your search engine placement. This is due primarily to
search engines having a hard time to index Flash content. But
with a little ingenuity we can use that very problem to our
advantage.
Let's first take a look at how search engine indexing can cause
you problems on your web site.
Most web sites are built up of menus and context areas. The
menus are frequently text based, making them easy to update or
change. The content is dependent on our writing creativity. Both
of these can lead to search engine indexing trouble.
Search Engines look through the text on your pages, menus as
well as content and they create their index on what they find.
So far so good. But just how do the search engines do this? They
can't look at your page and decide which is the main content
area visually, so they simply start at the top of the code and
work down.
If your site follows the standard pattern of a navigation bar on
either the top or down the left side of the page and uses a
table structure to achieve this, then your whole nav bar will be
read and indexed before your main content area. If your site has
a lot of variation then this shouldn't be a problem. But what if
your site is focused on one subject and your navigation bar
tends to repeat words? As an example you may have a site that
sells watches and your nav bar may read like this: Men's
Watches, Ladies Watches, Sport Watches, etc. You can see how
easy it is to repeat that word Watches.
Search engines like to give points to sites that contain
valuable content that is easily categorized and recognizable to
visitors, but they also take away points for keyword spamming.
In the above Watch example, the nav bar could easily cause your
page to be listed as a keyword spammer.
Here is the first Flash Trick to improve your ranking. Create
the navigation bar in Flash. This way all those repeating words
are now hidden from the search engine spiders. As an added
benefit the code taken up by the Flash will probably be less
than the code used in the text based nav bar. This will help the
search engine spiders to focus on the main content area of your
page.
Let's now look at another common problem with search engine
indexing. In this example consider a shopping site selling the
same watches as in our previous example. Each watch page will
have a description of the individual watch, and that is fine.
But each page may also have "boiler plate" text as well. There
may possibly be a standard description for a particular watch
brand, or possibly warranty or shipping information included on
the page.
Another red flag that goes up for the search engine spiders is
text repeating from page to page. The more distinct each page is
the more likely the search engines will consider the text as
relevant. If there is too much repeated text, the search engines
may even drop all the pages that they believe have duplicated
text. Not a good situation, especially if you don't want to be
forced into creating completely original text for every page on
your site.
Here is Flash Trick number two. Keep all the distinct content on
your pages as html text and convert any repeating text areas
into Flash files that are placed into the pages. This way, only
the distinct text is visible to the search engines and your
repeating text is hidden in the Flash file. Any text that you
tend to repeat from page to page is a prime candidate for the
Flash treatment.
So take a look through your web site. Do you have text menus
that use repetitive words? Do you use boiler plate text, or have
repeated text areas on several pages? If so you should let
Flash's disadvantage of being search engine unfriendly become
your advantage on making a search engine friendly site.
About the author:
George Peirson is a successful Internet Trainer. He is the
author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles
covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To
read his other articles and see his training sets visit
http://www.howtogurus.com Article copyright 2005 George Peirson
