Flash and Search Rankings Print
If search engine rankings are important to your website's success, and you are considering a flash based website, this article is a must-read.

What is flash?
Flash is a tool that allows websites to display movement and sounds on their website, much like an interactive video.

Why is it important?
Using flash navigation and flash transitions between pages of your site can have an incredibly negative impact on your rankings.  This is very important to recognize from the beginning.  After all, what good is a great looking website if no one sees it?  Lets get a little better understanding of why search engines and flash do not work well together.

Search engines send robots all over the web to crawl web pages and record any content they find.  These robots are very good at recording text, but this is not the case with flash and images.  Take the following example.  What is the difference between the black text and the blue text?
example example
The difference is that the blue is not text, it is an image.  You can see this by highlighting the words; notice that the blue image does not let you highlight individual letters, only the image as a whole.  Search engine robots do not know that that the image contains the word 'example' in blue; they are only aware that there is an image on the page.  Search engines have the same limitation with flash.  They are aware that the flash exists, but do a very poor job at recognizing what is contained within the flash.

Other problems with flash?
For many businesses, the costs for flash development do not justify the additional expense.  Flash also limits the browsing experience so that visually impaired and those with slower connections cannot visit your site.  Sites with extensive effects require users to wait for the page to load...not a good idea in the fast paced web environment.  Flash intros are an especially poor choice.  Finally, flash will not integrate to your content management system, meaning all changes to your site will require additional work from your developer.

So what is the solution?
Modern CSS coding and design allows the creation of very slick looking websites with mouse hover effects.  Skipping the flash doesn't mean you are stripping your site down to a boring interface; the look can look quite close to a flash design.  In all likelihood, the novelty of all those extra effects wears off quickly and can begin to irritate your visitors.

When to use flash?
Just like images, flash can be used as a great bonus to any web page.  Interactive product demonstrations, slideshows, and videos are just a few of the great ways to use flash as a compliment to your website.