Hi, I am using PHotoshop for images and some animation too, could it be bad for SEO? I heard some say flash is bad, would that mean Flash as software or flash as flashing images? thanks
Hi salim Flash is "bad" for SEO because mostly the contents of a Flash animation file can not be read by search engine software as it scans a web site. (what you've read refers to Macromedia Flash animation software)... Having images on a web site is acceptable but if you use graphic images to show the text content of your site, that is bad. Again, because search engine software can not read the text in an image. If the image only has a small amount of text in it, you can help alleviate this issue by including that text in the image's "alt" field- that element within the HTML coding for that image where alternative text goes. But you need to be aware of several factors. First, you can't expect to have a whole paragraph of text in that ALT element. Well, you can put that much in there, but the original purpose of an ALT field is to assist visually impaired site visitors who are using a page reader to know what that image is supposed to be for. And having a lot of text (more than a few words or maybe one sentence) makes all that text hard to digest. Also, the whole idea of search engine optimization is about getting your individual keyword phrases properly embedded in the content without over-saturation. And it's a good practice to never repeat any one keyword phrase more than two or three times in any single page's alt tag fields. (Doing more can potentially be seen as an attempt to spam the search engines). So go ahead and use graphic images on your site. But make the majority of your site's content available through standard HTML coding.
We can't say flash is bad flash is one of the very good way to create attractive websites but most of the seo are avoiding flash because it is creating problem to search engine when it crawl your site but but there is many way to promote your flash website also I'm also using flash on one of the my site and it is working good.
thanks for the answer, well appreciated, but again some people say it's safe to use flash Macromedia but needs to be kept somewhere...any idea how ( they refer may be to keep it as an extended file? ) and again regarding images, how about if I use enough text into my page to have a certain standard that could be crawled, wouldn't be enough no matter how many images I have?
using flash website is not good in seo because the code of that page is hard or not crawlable by search engine spider so if the spider couldnt crawl your page then it is very bad for SERP's.
The spiders like static pages best. I don't have a ton of experience with using flash on my sites...but you may wanna consider referencing the swf file dynamically, so that it pulls it externally which shouldn't affect the seo of your static site.
I agree with Zurk. I don't think flash is "bad" for SEO, but you won't gain anything from an SEO standpoint either. I think flash has its place, but only on certain types of websites. I'm a gamer, and sometimes it's cool to see neat little flash intros on sites that are made specifically for a certain game. But, if I'm going to a site for immediate information (like research an IT issue, news, directions, etc.), I don't want to have to try and skip past a stupid flash intro....
Please read this article about optimizing flash for google: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=454163 The main point is that you extract and rewrite your title text inside your flash application. This way it becomes more appealing to the search engine.