Recently I was asked by a client if I could optimize their flash web site so they could get high rankings in the search engines. All pages of this site were flash pages. This means there were no HTML pages except for a few links interspersed throughout the web pages.

Reasons why you shouldn't use flash for designing your web site:

• web pages don't contain any HTML. Search engines only spider html code.
• internet users with slow connections will not be able to view your web site. Flash sites often take a long time to load even if you have a fast internet connection.
• internet users who don't have the flash player installed in their browsers will not be able to display your site.

1. Complete Redesign

The best solution for optimizing a web site that is completely designed in flash is to do a complete redesign using XHML and CSS (the latest design technologies).

Why?

• search engines will read the code
• the pages will load faster because they will have clean code
• greater flexibility to make changes to the web site.
• less expensive than designing flash sites
• takes less time to develop an XHTML/CSS site than a flash site.

If you wanted to maintain your web site in Flash and still get it indexed by the search engines, create an HTML home page that links to your flash site then build lots of incoming links to it. It would not be as effective as building HTML pages but it does give you a work-a-round.

The downside is that you only have one page that can be indexed by the search engines. If you wish to compete in rankings with other sites that have 100s of HTML pages, your chances of getting better rankings than them are very slim.

3. Combination of HTML and Flash

Create HTML pages then embed the flash code in them. This means the web page will mostly have HTML code but still incorporate some flash elements ie a flash movie. If someone doesn't have flash installed in their browser, then give them the same version of the page but replace the flash with static images.

This is to satisfy those people that insist on having text flying in from the side, a movie playing and/or rotating flash banners on their web sites.

Conclusion

If you are a designer that is asked to build a site in flash, point out the benefits of designing it with XHTML/CSS. It will take less time, cost less and be search engine friendly. You may have the opportunity to build a long lasting relationship with your client if he asks you to maintain his site by boosting its rankings with ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) work.

Ultimately the site owner will want to receive more traffic and increased sales.