Flash and SEO – understanding the balance and implications.

We understand the importance of the Brand – all companies need to keep careful control of how they come across to their audience – and the importance of presenting a good image to your audience – whether clients or candidates – on your website is very high. You only get one chance in many ways.

Visually, your site needs to do the job well, and we must accept that one of the big tools in ‘grabbing’ people is animated, (usually Flash) graphics in some way. There’s no avoiding it… things that ‘move’ tend to work. (Within reason – we’ve all been to sites that are way, way too annoying before!).

The problem is, of course, that Flash is effectively a graphical interface – the words or messages in Flash are not indexed by Google or any search engines. They’re ‘empty’ words as far as SEO goes. So does that mean you should be avoiding Flash for your new recruitment website? Well… not really, but you do need to get the balance right.

As this article describes very well, there is a balance to be struck. On one extreme, you could go all out with Flash for that mega cool graphical interface, then try your best to optimise, or (at the other end of the spectrum) go for a more traditional text website but throw in the odd smidgen of Flash to lift things.  The latter is a significantly better route for SEO if you can make your brand work around the concept of organic SEO.  There is a lot that can be done by small bits of dynamic, ‘moving’ content without going for a wholly flash-based solution.  If you do go down the flash route, prepare yourself for some pretty poor organic search traffic.