Flash ECommerce Optimization


The search engine world has evolved in the recent times and still we cannot be completely sure about flash designing. It is still difficult to get flash e-commerce sites crawled and ranked the way it is done in the traditional techniques of search engine optimization. The main problem is that content in flash code cannot be indexed by the search engines, hence the website ranking is not done. The reason is that search engines see flash as a graphic and cannot  read always what is inside it. Therefore, an on line flash designer should consider the following:

The Flash Advantages:


  • Creative special effects

  • Innovative animations using images and sound

  • Easy to use Interactive applications

  • Flash works across platforms and browsers

  • Accuracy for web designers


The Flash Dis-advantages:


  • Massive learning curve involved

  • Long time for loading

  • Flash is blocked by few firewalls

  • Many people  prefer not to use flash

The SEO, for a flash e-commerce sites have limitations like:


  • Meta tags – keyword, description, title and research

  • Link building – link exchanges, directory submissions, article submissions and press releases

It is advisable to know your keywords and observe how competitive is the market. If there is not much competition then you many rank a full flash website on selected keywords but if its very competitive it is impossible to reach near to it, of course the search engines are improving and will soon be able to read the content of flash.

Use of flash design should be considered for different types of movies on multiple html pages to give you more pages for visitors to come into your website. This makes it easy for the search engines to pick up internal links and content. This will  give more pages to concentrate various keywords to help you to rank in more fields. The drawback here is that for each page that you create, sometimes the visitor has to again download a large flash file.

Give your visitors the option of viewing a flash so the search engines can read the html version and you can attract your visitors with flash version.

To help the search engines index your website it is worth embedding flash into your html. This gives you a SEO website plus enhanced usability and menus. You have to consider the internal linking strategy with this option and make navigation which can be read by search engines so they are able to search through your website.

Flash e-commerce sites should be designed in places to impress the user but never hide your content from the search engines. If  flash is used as part of  navigation, add additional text links without failing, to let the search engines to crawl your website.

If you want to pursue the full flash option then make sure you research your keywords and make your meta data clear for the search engines. Confirm you have an html home page which is optimized by the keyword with plenty of useful content for search engines. Provide a text version of your website that search engines can crawl and put all your efforts into your link building strategy.