No! No! to FLASH Websites
Websites that are built using FLASH are the most sophisticated and beautiful websites there are. The design, the navigation, sound effects and the amount of creativity within these sites are some of the benefits that other HTML websites lack. However, there is a big issue with all-FLASH websites: search engines can't read them.
Search engine spiders (crawlers) do not have the abilitiy to read and index images, JavaScript files and FLASH. When they see these files, they simply avoid them. So, if your website is built in FLASH, then there is a huge possibility that your website is not coming up on the main page of the search engines. It is even possible that the search engines have not listed your site at all (even on the 1,000 th page).
What Do I Do With My FLASH Website?
Yes. You have spent thousands of dollars designing your beautiful website and now you just found out that it is useless when it comes to getting traffic from the search engines. What are you supposed to do now?
The answer is not simple. However, there are many things you can do. Here is a couple of them:
Redesign Your Website
The easiest thing (and the most expensive thing) is to ask your website designer to completely redesign your site, but this time in HTML format. I am sure he would be happy to do so. But make sure to tell him to create the banner in FLASH and leave the content in HTML format. By doing so, you benefit from FLASH's beautiful and easy to navigate elements and on the other hand your site will have spider food (content) so, search engines will love your site too.
Here Is the Trick
But maybe you are almost out of budget and you want to fix the FLASH site, so search engines can read it as well. This is not as hard as it sounds, but it is a bit tricky.
What you need to ask your designer to do is to place the whole FLASH file within an HTML file. Then you need to ask him to copy and paste all of the content on the bottom of the page (where it is not visible to your site's visitor unless they scroll down). On the bottom of this text, you need to ask your web designer to place a few text-links each linking to an internal page of your site.
But your site doesn't have any internal pages because EVERYTHING IS IN FLASH. That's right. Here is the tricky part. Your website designer will need to create the internal pages using the content from each page of the FLASH file. On the top of each page, there would be the same FLASH file (the website as a whole) and on the bottom the text specific to that page. On the bottom of each page, there should be the text links pointing to other pages.
If everything is done correctly, you will end up with having multiple pages that look exactly the same (to your site's visitors) and yet are different (because the content on the bottom of each page is different).
The content of these pages will be indexed by the search engines and each page will come up on their data base based on the keywords it has.
Is This Spamming the Search Engines?
NO. This is not by any means tricking the search engines. You are just making it easier for them to index the content they can't read. After all, it's not your fault they can't read FLASH files, right?
What Are the Drawbacks?
You had to ask that question, didn't you? Of course there are drawbacks to everything tricky you do. And here it is the time it takes the browsers to download the FLASH file and the content as well as the links on the bottom of the page. So, loading time for the pages will be longer than when you only had your FLASH site.
Contact Us for More Information
If you’re looking for a professional dental Internet marketing firm, you’ve come to the right place. Give us a call at 1-877-932-6559 or email us for a free consultation to see how we can get you more patients.
