The Seo blog

There is a great deal of web technology available that allows you to accomplish a lot of what you may need done in Flash; however, if you absolutely must use Flash, make sure to include an alternative textual description for your Flash file. Do not, under any circumstances, create an entire website using Flash.

The only way to avoid destroying your website’s SEO campaign when creating an entire website using Flash is to include, inside of your website, a link to view the website in Flash. This link should, again, be included inside of your website and not as an option to ‘View site in Flash’ on the index page of your website. If you do this, then be sure that all of the content included inside of the Flash website is included in your regular XHTML website.Trying to maintain a Flash website and a regular website is going to be a lot more work in comparison to only having to maintain a regular website using XHTML. However, if you’re going to go down this road, then it is absolutely imperative that you create a separate website with content outside of Flash if you want people to be able to locate your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This topic is debatable. Some people may disagree with us completely and instead advise you to avoid producing anything in Flash - especially an entire website. Although we advise against creating an entire website in Flash, if you must do so, then using this solution that we have provided is required if you want to have a SEO friendly website design and content that is indexable by the Search Engine Spiders.

All of that juicy textual content that you want people to find and eventually read is worthless to Search Engine Spiders. When the spiders crawl your website, any Flash files that the spiders stumble upon will be ignored - including all of the content inside. If your entire website is built using Flash, then you’re committing what is commonly referred to as ‘SEO suicide’. Using Flash (especially for your entire website) is the worst thing that you can do and should be avoided at all costs.

Assembling an SEO friendly website design is not rocket science, but there is a methodical way to go about doing it. We’ve compiled a list of the most important things that a SEO friendly website design needs in order to have a solid foundation for its search engine optimization campaign. Whether you’re an amateur web designer attempting to integrate SEO into your website or a professional web designer looking to refine your approach to creating SEO friendly website design, this guide has something for everyone.

The process of creating a successful search engine optimization campaign can be compared to the construction of a new building - without a solid foundation (SEO friendly website design), the building (your website) won’t be sturdy or safe to occupy. Ultimately, the risk of the building collapsing (your website SEO campaign failing) significantly increases because of a poorly constructed foundation.

The following list, organized by importance - from most important to least important (but still important), covers all of the basic (and some of the more advanced) methods to effectively and efficiently optimize your website design for SEO:

• don’t use Flash (and how to survive if you absolutely must use it)
• don’t use frames (and how to survive if you absolutely must use them)
• the foundation of the foundation: keyword research
• researched keywords in Title and tags
• researched keywords in URL (filenames and folders)
• CSS drop down navigation (no Javascript or Flash); CSS stylesheets
• density of researched keywords in document text; don’t hide text
• researched keywords in anchor text (the text that contains a hyperlink)
• researched keywords in headings andlt;H1;H2;H3; etc.
• images (including researched keywords in ‘alt’ tags, no text in images)