That Flash is Pretty Flashy

So I get an email from a guy wanting an evaluation on his flash site before it goes live. The site is a well put together design and very visually appealing. The one problem is that there is no content, visual, HTML or otherwise. It is basically one big flash movie broken up into little flash movies accessible by the "mystery meat" navigation.

He told me that he wanted to make sure that his site was "found" on the Internet and that was the primary goal. I referenced countless articles that spoke about SEM and how flash was best used as elements within the site, including a post on Google's Webmaster Central Blog that said "Try to use Flash only where it is needed..." Linking strategies aside, I told him that "content was king" and how compelling and properly written content with appropriate key word density would yield better results than a flashy looking website.

The next day I got an email from his web designer that said I was "horribly wrong" and if "the design sucks then content will not mean anything." He went on to say that flash has been the SEO standard since October of 2004. To which I retorted, "ohh yeah, I forgot about that" and left it at that.

According Johnathan Hochman there are ways to make flash sites "spiderable" but not may designers will do it. Johnatan Hochman also concedes that, "A site built entirely with Flash suffers a great disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash "page,"... Most SEO expert agree that flash should be used as elements in HTML pages where spiders can glean the information and return home with real content.

Your comments are welcome!