A Beginners Guide to Flash and SEO

We have all heard that flash and search engine optimisation are not two words that go together but there are some little tricks you can use to give your site some food for the spiders and keep all the fancy dan animations.

Have a html alternative

Not everyone likes flash websites – whether they don’t like the loading times or the annoying music its just their preference and they would rather use a standard html website to view your products/services.

Creating a html version of your website isn’t difficult to do and will definitely take less time than producing the flash version. The html version can use elements of flash if required but there are lots of other methods of getting movement and animations without flash.

Jquery

Jquery has burst onto the scene in recent times and gives developers a chance to create flash like fades and scrollers without loading times or complications. There are hundreds of Jquery tutorials and code snippets you can simply copy and paste onto your code. Look at the image swap on this websites home page – it was all done using Jquery. The image fade out onwww.kitchenlabcontracts.co.uk was done using a simple javscript add on. Do a view source to see how simple the code is.

Flash Replace

Want to use a fancy font without using an image? Flash text replace is what you need. Simply choose your font by amending the simple flash file – add the code to your CSS and get all the fancy fonts you crave on your website. H1, H2, H3 tags can all be controlled via flash replace – if the user doesn’t have flash it will replace the font with another as defined in your CSS file.

The great thing about flash replace is that you get all the benefits of using indexable text without the “flash” penalty.

UFO

Most flash websites now use the UFO code to ensure that he user doesn’t have to click the flash object to start using it but did you know that you can place whatever text you have on your flash site inside the div that gets replaced with the flash file?

Place inside a Div all your H1’s and paragraph tags with your keywords and promotional text and the spiders will have lots of juicy text to feed on whilst the user is presented with the flash animations.

These are just a few methods of utilising flash or flash like animations on your website and giving the search engines plenty of text to index.

Have any more tricks? Get in touch with us and we will keep this article updated.