A very 'easy' question............ Does Flash make life difficult for SEO a site and difficult for Search Engines to find it? Thanks
Flash itself, while it can get indexed, won't really rank well in the search engines. The best practice is to embed the flash file within html pages so you still have the flash (accessible by people who have flash installed) and you can still get your site indexed properly by the search engines. I normally create two versions: the page first checks to see if flash is installed. If it's installed in the person's browser, then they get the flash page. If they don't have flash installed (search engine spiders don't have flash installed), then they get the same page but the flash is a graphic/image on the page and the text on the page is displayed in normal text.
I'm with Bhartzer, flash is not necessarily bad and can actually add very much to the appeal and experience of a site as long as it does not contain too much of the content on your pages. embed small flash files into your properly optimized HTML based website.
As long as you have good content through the rest of the page and your page is fully optimized for the keywords you are targeting, and you also have good link popularity for your keywords then it will not matter if you have flash on your site or not.
Depends how you use it. If you use Flash instead of images... I think it matters little. However, if you make a flash-driven website, then yes, it will make it harder to rank.
Actually, if you are using flash for design or as an image only, just put an alt tag on it for you to place your keywords. But if you want to build a pure flash site, there is a small chance to be indexed by SEs, especially Google. There are flash sites that are indexed by Google, but majority are movies, games, etc. So I suggest that you minimize the use of flash and concentrate on normal html design with an external CSS/Java on it.
The problems for full flash sites to rank in the search engines is the lack of indexable content. You can instead use small flash movies on different pages of the site and optimize each movie and the page with appropriate titles and content. In the absence of indexable content, make sure the pages have appropriate meta tags.
I agre with everyone. You should never have a flash site sitting alone. Always have an html version of the site for SEO purposes. Those pages will rank but people could still see the flash version. I have heard that the SERP's are getting better at understanding flash. Bit why cause a headache for yourself. You could always blend flah and html together......
the best for a flash sites to have a traffic is to promote & link building more on OFF PAGE optimization...