Recently I stumbled over a website completely buildt in flash. I checked the website with my websitegrader-tool and got a very bad value for Inbound Marketing. This tool checks everything like SEO, readability, existence of blogs and twitter, etc.
The tool mentioned a couple of points missing – the most important have been:
– no headers
– no readable content
Why is this?
Although sites buildt in flash look good – they are unusable for search engines. Search engines cannot read text embedded in flash – all the important keywords are lost for indexing. Keywords in the meta-tags are history. Google switched this off long ago as users misused it – other search engines will follow (if they didn’t it already). And its a big mistake thinking that the title-info is enough!
How can you get around this?
To keep the current site you can do a redirection for the crawlers to a text-only page. As this method is already well documented on the web I am not going here into details.
But here is a big “BUT”:
You are dependent on the developer to make changes to your site – it gets costly when you have several changes over the time – and search engines like fresh content!
Keep in mind that “content is king” to be found – and that’s not easy with flash-only sites!