New Flash SEO

United States of America (Press Release) January 24, 2008 -- I am a developer for Richardson Graphics. I have been developing full Flash websites for over 5 years. It has always been a difficult task trying to convince customers they should use Flash over other types of web programming. Only about 5% of the time am I able to give a good enough sales pitch to convince customers to use a Flash only site. This isn't much of a problem for me because I've stayed fairly busy and I'm a small company and that is my niche in the market.

The reasons customers would not use full Flash sites before now are:
• No SEO, cannot be crawled by search engines.
• No back button and browser history support.
• Complicated Flash detection.
• No deep linking.

All of these reasons were valid and reasons for a company interested in marketing their site not to use a full Flash website. Those days are 100% gone!

I have been able to take public code that some designers are using in their Flash detection system and take it to levels of sophistication that no other designer in the world is currently doing. My Flash detection system allows a fast install of Flash if you do not have Flash 7 or higher installed, which is less than 3% of all web browsers according to adobe.com.

This new detection system also allows one click of the back button to the previous page, not sending you back through the Flash detections system, a big no no for SEO. I've also developed further public code that allows me to program the back button and browser history to work on my sites. This makes the full Flash site act like a normal html site, even changing the address and title of each page. This feature also allows for deep linking. This means that you can copy a link of the page you are on, i.e. http://www.richardson-graphics.com/#/Portfolio/ and paste it into a new browser and you'll be taken directly to the portfolio page. This is great for marketing.

Finally the big one, the crawlable content for SEO. With the new detection system you can place alternate html content for those who don't have Flash installed. Users who visit your site get this html alternate content replaced by the Flash movie so fast they never see the html content if they have the right player installed. This is important because now full Flash sites can have content that is crawlable as well! With this there is an ethical dilemma though.

The dilemma is that you can flood your index page with content not relevant to your site or even located in your site and no one would know. Black hat SEO for sure. Google will of course soon be able to test for this and penalize your site. For this reason one should make sure that the content in the html alternate content is the same content located throughout your site. This way it is true alternate content for the website and when Google looks at your site they won't penalize you because you'll be using a White hat SEO approach.

Of course you still must do all the other things to get your page ranked, like w3c page validation, no broken links, sitemap, verify code and link building. Link building is still king with Google.
With this new technology a full Flash site can equal it's long time rival of an html website. This definitely levels the playing field between Flash and html. Flash designers like myself will be able to promote and sale SEO for their Flash sites. Oh what a glorious day! Look for the amount of Flash content to significantly grow on the web. And those guys who said there will never be a way to build a Flash site that can be indexed, well the day has come.