march

Hi

I would be grateful for advice on the following: I have had a website built for my new business, the designers seem to have used flash and images. Does this mean that it will never have a chance of being picked up by search engines? The designers say they have hidden key words in its set up ( whatever that means) am I best to abandon this and go for a html site- any ideas?

Thankyou

mars guitars

Personally I would stay away from Flash-only websites as it's very difficult to see what's going on and it's difficult to maintain. I believe there are ways of annotating Flash content for Search Engines, but you're totally reliant on your designers and it's much more difficult to maintain and optimise.

I'd go for html every time... with sparing use embeded Flash only where useful

(just my humble views... I don't pretend to be a Flash expert)

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PS: can you let is know the url of the site in question so we can have a look-see??

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Alan

Flash based websites may look nice and sophistacated but the Flash elements do require alternative text to be added for the search engines and accessibilty purposes. Think of a flash object being similar to a picture, the SE's can't read the picture directly, but they can read text associated with the picture, and so it is for Flash. Is there a text version of the site?

Unless you know Flash and have access to the source files (which if you commissioned the site and paid for it you are entitled to have) it will be impossible to maintain. I'd be concerned about what they mean by hidden keywords, SEs don't like things hidden.

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ahb Solutions Consultancy and Web Development

Seen a good post - Give some reputation click on the

usearchme

Yup give us a look and we will be able to give you better advice then !

Woc

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VPM

A frontpage without flash and and and alternative HTML pages for people who hate flash is good seo.

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ev8321

I have lost a lot of respect for people who design and recommend flash only websites. Kills you in the search engines. This tells me that the designer is not willing to open their mind to what's happening in the world and the changing evolution of the internet.
Parts of flash are great, entire websites are definently NOT!!!

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donato1976

If they used Flash for navigation menus, i.e. no text links, search engines will not be able to index the website.

enous

Yep,use the SEO tips to design it.

march

Thankyou for all your comments

The site is http://www.katherinemaylin.com

I would realy like to know whether this site would ever get picked up by search engines- being as it is only in flash. The text only bit has just been added yesterday, the designers assure me that everything is OK but is there a tool that I can use to check for myself? as from reading your comments I have lost confidence.

Thankyou

Spency

Flash based websites, and by this I mean only flash content, nothing else, are going to struggle when it comes to ranking in the engines.

I see they have put all of the content in the souce coding so the engines can try to pick it up, but I still think it will struggle to rank.

Unless people are searching for katherine maylin (your url) then it is going to be hard to pick up traffic via other keywords, especially, and here is quite a major flaw, your designers have not added description or keyword meta tags !!!

The small engines rely on these, so you must get these sorted, Google relies on content, so I think it is going to be very hard for you.

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Spency

And this is really poor :

http://www.katherinemaylin.com/textonlyversion.htm

It is like saying - if you dont like flash, we do not like you.

You should have an html version as well and let people choose on the home page as to what they want.

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alemcherry

Keep the flash to a minimum. You need text content if you need good ranking.
Hidden text will get you banned. Ask the designer to remove it ASAP.

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linkplacementservices

In case of html site use H1 H2 tags control the look and feel with CSS and I guess this will resolve most of the problem

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imrankhan

I dont like flash sites at all. It is only good design thats it. Sometime I noticed that a banner on my website cant be seen who have not installed flash software. Still loads of people using old operating system and they can't see flash websites.

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