by Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

There was a discussion at Red Bricks Media recently between our chief search strategist, Craig Hordlow, and the Red Bricks Media creative services team, regarding the pros and cons of employing Flash as a primary web design component. In particular, the discussion revolved around the following question: how does Flash design fit within the larger framework of a search engine optimization strategy? The conversation went something like this:

Craig: “Flash is to SEO what fire is to your home: a total disaster.”
Creative: “But what about interactivity? What about the cool factor?”
Craig: “People want info quickly. They don’t want to figure out which floating monkey to click on to get back to the home page.”
Creative team: “We love monkeys, especially floating monkeys.”

This heavily paraphrased conversation highlights an ongoing conundrum for many in the marketing community: build more interactivity and cutting-edge design into the web experience via Flash, or build easily indexable and discoverable websites for search using more traditional web language?

As we discovered in redesigning the new Red Bricks Media website, there is no simple answer. There are valid reasons to build a website, using different information architecture strategies, in order to satisfy different goals and end uses, for the benefit of many different target audiences.

Knowing this, opportunities abound to employ both Flash and/or more traditional web language in the fulfillment of a successful marketing strategy. I suppose it really depends on the objectives of your marketing strategy. The desire to entertain, wow and impress your customers with cutting-edge Flash design shouldn’t interrupt or trump the need to be discoverable, indexable and searchable via Google and Yahoo, and vice versa.

Scouring the internet, as well as some useful in-office brains, has yielded helpful tips in approaching the deployment of Flash and how it may fit into your SEO strategy:

1. Don’t place Flash content where advertising normally lives on a web page. Why? It will likely be ignored or mistaken for…you guessed it…advertising.
2. If Flash content will live within a page keep it to half the screen or less and preferably on the left side of the page, per widely read eye behavior studies.
3. Make Flash complementary to the message on the page, not the message itself.
   a. We all know how effective a half-heard, half-understood message can be!
4. Speaking of half: half the country still dials up to the internet, meaning you can lose precious customers in the extra seconds it takes your Flash content to load.
5. Don’t use Flash to tell a story about a product/service, use it to enhance the story.
   a. Use HTML to express important purchase/learn more text info on the page
   b. Use Flash to emphasize product details (360 view, colors, sizes, etc.)
6. Create keyword-rich, SEO-informed title tag and meta descriptions on every page where Flash content is featured.
7. Provide a “text equivalent” for every non-text element on a Flash page.
   a. This goes for Flash as well as images, maps, applets, audio, video, etc.
   b. Providing equivalent information for inaccessible content is also the primary way to make your website accessible to people with disabilities.

Hopefully, your marketing strategy won’t call for a comprehensive, highly integrated SEO strategy using a 100% Flash website. If so, you may want to have a conversation with Craig and our SEO team, who may in turn recommend that you develop a new SEO strategy and a new website, or at the very least, a website without the floating monkeys.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Craig Hordlow, Creative Services, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.