When Flash first came around, every web designer wanted to learn it and every website owner wanted their website converted to it. Flash sites look great, navigate well, and offer a much better user experience. But, there are several problems that come along with a flash site, and one is that it is difficult to optimize Flash for SEO unless you break it down into more manageable pieces.
The early Flash websites consisted of just one HTML page with Flash embedded into it. Although this looked great and worked well, search engines could pick up nothing from the Flash code. All they saw was a simple HTML page with no information on it, and so they did not catalog it. The same will happen today if you build a site that has a lot of Flash on it.
The best thing you can do to optimize Flash for SEO is to use Flash in pieces, in particular for navigation, rather than for the entire site. You need to have basic HTML on your site so that the search engines can read it, and also so that it is readable by various readers used by the visually disabled. If you are building a corporate or governmental site, then your site should be ADA-compatible as well as SEO compatible.
Once you have built your website using Flash, you have to pay close attention to the source code and make sure that there are “alt” tags for every piece of text that is displayed by Flash. Also, your navigation needs to be clear enough so that each individual page is cataloged. You can optimize Flash for SEO, but it does take a little more work – so much so, that you may actually reconsider using Flash as nothing more than decorative on your web site.
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