Traditional method of creating websites using proven & tested HTML / CSS stands even today a most reliable method of creating website design,but at the same time,website design using Adobe’s Flash technology is gaining momentum quite strongly.It is generally accepted that if you are after a very designer made website design,which looks just out of the world and has the ability to extract that WOW from your potential customer,you are advised to use flash while creating your website.It has the ability to give that extra edge when it comes to design and make the customer experience ever more interactive and satisfactory.Iamnot saying, it is all about the good things,in fact it comes with few issues of it’s own and for this article,we will cover it’s impact on search engine optimization – SEO, i.e. you’re website rankings on search engines.

Let’s start with…

1. Same URL for all the content on the website.If you are building a good size website,where the intention is to create a good information resource for the subject you intend to cover,a normal practice is to devote a part of the website providing in depth information by creating few different pages with relevant headings and names.This not only helps users to associate and remember the content more easily, but it also helps search engines togather what a particular web page is meant for and give it a correct and appropriate ranking.However, by using FLASH this makes it altogether impossible or to say the least,a lot more harder and expensive.No doubts,there are ways around but are they really that effective and for that matter useful?
2. Search engine optimisation fundamentalsFor an effective on-site href=”http://www.neotericuk.co.uk/seo.php”>web optimization,few things are needed to be properly addressed, for example page titles, meta tags,page headlines,link text,use of bold and strong tags,image alt tags and most of these bits are either missing from flash implementation or just very hard to achieve through flash.
3. Search engine crawlersBefore we even start any work on the website for SEO purposes,usually the first task is to establish what search engines can read on the website and whatever ready, is that good or needs improvements. Task is usually easier when it comes to traditional forms of website design using HTML,CSS as it’s quite easy to determine using a trillion 3rd party tools but with flash based websites,it is usually a matter of luck or let’s say Hope as there is no definite material out yet to exactly know how search engines are going to react.
4. Content layout and characteristics.Search engines are now known to index the SWF files and read the text within.However,the problem is that with flash and unlike in HTML,you can not style text using <h> or <b> tags and that usually results in text to be all jumbled up and makes it ever more in-effective.
5. Website loading times.If you are building a good size website using flash,believe me it can take some time to load on your browser (depending upon your internet speeds).This can lead to fair amount of trouble with search engines as it’s usually known that sites taking longer than usual to load don’t get too high on search engines.