Optimizing Flash and Graphic-Heavy Pages
Posted: December 10th, 2007
Every SEO knows to avoid using Flash to build websites like it’s the plague, but there are times when a client’s needs will call for Flash elements. Graphic designers and especially animators absolutely love Flash because it’s generally easy to use and works across multiple platforms and browsers. Unfortunately, spiders will simply ignore any animation on a page and disregard any “content” that may be in the presentation.
So how can you balance your client’s graphical demands while accomplishing your SEO duties? First of all, only use Flash where it is absolutely necessary, and do not make an entire website from it. That is, incorporate Flash elements in an HTML-based website. This will give you more content to work with and more of a site to optimize.
Secondly, try to optimize as much of the animation or graphic as you can in terms of title tags, filenames, and links. This usually isn’t as effective as a good keyword-rich block of text, but describing what those graphical elements represent can go a long way in the overall optimization of the page.
Lastly (for you really savvy SEOs and webmasters), make good use of the z-index attribute, which primarily allows you to “stack” objects on-top of each other. Place some good old-fashion optimized content under your animations and graphics for the spiders to crawl, but be sure not to abuse it. The z-index attribute is not meant to hide your spammy links and text, and search engines will undoubtedly punish websites that engage in this practice.
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