Making Good Use Of Flash

Adding some jazz to your web design is definitely a must if you want your site to be really attention grabbing. This is why putting on Flash applications and fancy scripts has become quite popular with many web designers recently. However, using these items can be likened to holding a double edged sword.

Though Flash applications will certainly get they eyes of users, they are quite bad for SEO work. This is because Flash and other scripts are not detected by search engines, due to the fact that these are embedded program codes and not web information. Because of this one, adding Flash can be quite detrimental to your site, instead of boosting it.

However, this is not to say that you should avoid Flash at all cost. As have been said, using Flash and other scripts does offer their own set of advantages in making your site more interesting. Instead, what you need to do here is to integrate these items seamlessly with your web design. And luckily, there are plenty of ways you can do so to make your site more effective.

The first thing that you need to consider is when to use Flash sites. Your main concern here is your site's content and what you want to say about it. If you think that you can send your message without the need for elaborate Flash movies, then don't add any. As an example, text based article sites can pretty much do well without Flash, on the other hand tutorial sites will definitely benefit a lot from Flash movies in aiding the demostrations.

And while Flash movies will definitely enhance your site's contents, it wouldn't be a good idea to make them the central item of your site. As have been mentioned, these aren't easily detected by search engines and it will definitely spell disaster for your site's rankings if SE's can't detect your central object. Instead, put on a more search engine friendly piece as your main attraction.

And you will also be able to improve your Flash site's search engine visibility by surrounding this with optimizable items. For instance, a brief description of your Flash movie's contents can go both ways by telling your readers what to expect of it, as well as being a spot to put in your keywords. Also, avoid using Flash for your site's banners and instead go for traditional methods, since you want these to be the first ones to be noticed by SE's.

Another thing that you can do to make your site more visible is by making good use of metadata. Though this one is often neglected by many, optimizing metadata will definitely be helpful in giving search engines more information about your Flash components. You just need to make sure that your metadata also contains information to optimize your site as a whole.

Lastly, you can make use of some applications that will extract text based data from Flash movies, which you can then send to search engines. These will come in handy for presenting a web ready document that links to your Flash items. You can use these effectively with other programs that determine which sections can be easily presented to SE's.