Blogscribo

Just make sure you have a sitemap that is crawlable.

traderzoe

An important point that has been overlooked is that nothing on your site could not be done be done with css and a little javascript. Thus the decision to use flash seems not only damaging to your SERP rankings, but without the style and flair that makes a flash-only site worth it in the first place.

As people have already stated, flash is the same as an image on the page that cannot yet be "read" and indexed. But in the case of a flash-only website it is the same as having one image and one page for the entire site, and much worse than even the text-only version that is currently on your site even if all the same text were included as alternate content.

I strongly believe people should not design websites with SEO as the primary design factor. There are times that the RIGHT thing for the site and for your customers will defy SEO "rules". But in the end the best content will find the people, whether it is wrapped up in a slick flash site or not. Unfortunately flash-only sites that have the best content/presentation are few and far between, not to mention expensive and as was pointed out several times already, much more difficult to maintain and grow.

Good content with good design is always the best place to start for good SEO. All the other "tips and tricks" become common sense routine best practices in time anyway, and still always come back to good original content.

I agree with all the previous statements made. Consider a pure xhtml/css re-design. And if you are really concerned about SEO you will want to consider some deeper content beyond the promo/marketing material. For example take some of those wonderful testimonials and turn them into full page case studies.

Best of luck.

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Elert123

Looks are somewhat of a website depending on what niche it is...Looks and Flash won't bring traffic thought

coolguy27

Oh my a flash site? SEs prefer and like static pages (html type) they are SE friendly. If you want to optimized your flash site better create a non flash version and optimized it.

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jon-d

Just reading through these posts and I am so glad that someone made this observation!
There is no reason for this site to be designed in flash, you could achieve the same look and feel with a search engine friendly programming language.

To make some points on previous comments- Flash is not all bad. In some instances marketeers dont care about search engine rankings. If offline promotion is the main marketing effort, or a website is in a very niche market for example. In these situations flash maybe a viable option as they can look more aesthetically appealing.
Also, as mentioned in previous posts, there are various ways to combat the fact that flash is so se unfriendly. Building a html version of the site is a good one. Also, html text can be embedded into a flash website.
you could always go bh too ( ) , server side cloak googlebot to a static version of the site that displays ONLY the written content and pages from the flash site. Then, include a "no archive" meta tag so competition cant view the cloaked site in the serp's. ooooooh, naughty!!!!! hehe

sums123

Use flash to use as header image only.

Tell your designers to built the same site using CSS.

SolutionP

For such cases better use Google site map for sure.

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jon-d

Wow! this didnt even strir up a response.


A sitemap with links to flash pages isnt going to help.