Whilst waiting for Google to discover my basic attempt at SEO for Flash I hav been scouring the web and getting a better idea of progress down this road. What I’ve discovered is:
- There are already some great solutions out there (isn’t it always the way), but these are relatively recent – mid 2007 is the earliest mention I could find.
- The most popular solution is the SWFaddress example. However as far as I can tell this relies on the php mod-rewrite being available on your server – which isn’t that hard but is probably beyond the skills of your average DIY website developer/small business owner.
- There is a lot of disparaging of Flash as a tool in some SEO circles (SWFaddress SEO solution, Reaction to Google/Adobe announcement of Flash indexing in Google. A lot of which I can understand, but I think like anyone who is heavily involved in one particular area of technology can tend to be a bit biased to there view.
- I was interested to read a small business liftout in the local rag a couple of weeks ago which contained lots of helpful advice for aspiring smalltime entrepeneurs including quite a lot of info on setting up a website and how important that is nowadays. What really grabbed my attention was an article suggesting that startups should not worry about the design of their site but should put down $5000 for an SEO consultant. Interestingly another article from online version of the same publication give much better DIY advice.
Now I’ve just started building flash site templates that are primarily aimed at this small business entrepeneur/ web development hobbyist, because the one thing I know flash can do really well is separate content from code without requiring any server side setup. I’ve also been though a few years working at Fairfax Digital where SEO is an integral part of all website development – basically a sizeable percentage of traffic to all FD sites (theage.com.au, mycareer.com.au to mention a couple). So I feel like I can see both sides of the Flash vs SEO debate.
I think that expecting cash strapped small time startups to lay out $5000 is plain ridiculous (interestingly the article I read in the paper didn’t mention SEO DIY tools like the Google Keyword Tool – and the online article I linked to above nice and clearly highlights that a good SEO effort can be done by the small business owner – basically because they are more likely to understand their niche and be able to provide relevant and interesting content that should keep Google happy.
So the SEO message for small business is – target a specific bunch of keywords rather than aim for something competitive and generic. Which leads me to think that perhaps my humble Flash SEO effort which essentially plonks the site content into the <noscript> tag could be a perfectly viable solution for DIY website developers. They get the ease of publishing (and the inbuilt nice, professional design that is hard to break) as well as the SEO benefits – because surely if they are targetting a niche, and have attracted inbound links because they have good content then their Flash site should do just as well as an XHTML effort.
It’s not a brilliant solution if you have a Flash site with a lot of content (SWFaddress is probably the best – although there is debate about the problem of people using the wrong type of inbound link – the one with the hash in it). And if you have a seriously large amount of content then I agree that an all Flash site is a really bad idea. But to me it seems clear that your average small time no-budget web developer isn’t after the ultimate solution, they’re just after a solution that is easy quick, works well and looks good.
