Stuck with a flash Web site? Don’t panic! There are ways to optimise.

No two ways about it. Flash-only websites can be delightful, engaging, dynamic and creative.

That’s provided they’re done right. Often there are downsides.

Problem 1. Like you, usually what I see is a flash home page, with the standard loading bar at 10%, then 20% then 30%... Even with broadband, some of those pages can take longer to load than actually play!

See, some developers use tricks to speed things up; they play the finished site to the client from their laptop’s hard drive – it’s much quicker than an internet connection! Client loves it, but web user’s just hit the back button. That’s if they can find the website in the first place. Which leads us to:

Problem 2. Developers rarely tell their clients about the almost complete lack of Search Engine friendliness of flash websites. It’s extremely rare to see a flash-only website ranking 1st at Google. At the moment, Google isn’t able to read the content of flash files.

So if you’re stuck, what can you do the get your flash-only website ranking strongly?

Here are 4 tips for improving your flash-only website search engine ranking.

1. The cheapest, easiest and safest option is to make sure your title tag, meta content description and keyword tags are optimised for key phrases you’re trying to target.
   
   If you’re comfortable with risk, you may consider loading up your title tag with lots of key words and phrases so you cover all the content in your flash-only Web site.
   
   One I saw a few years ago was www.buy-n-shoot.com.au – it’s not a flash site, but it’s got some of the longest title tags I’ve ever seen! It also ranks really, really well for competitive key phrases like ‘second hand digital camera’, and has done for years.
   
   It’s a risky move, personally I’d never try it on with a client’s web site as it’s a bit over-done (a bit too over optimised) and could see you penalised in the long term.
   
   But if you’re tanking in the search results anyway, you might as well give it a go! If you did get penalised, you wouldn’t necessarily be completely removed from the index, you might just cop a ranking penalty instead (so you’re probably no worse off). Still, Google’s Google, and I (obviously) can’t speak on their behalf as to how they might respond.
   
2. More technically, you can create div tag on your home page containing your entire site’s content which human’s won’t be able to see, but Google’s robot can.
   
3. You can create HTML copies of your Flash pages for the Google Bot. If you create HTML copies, include a robots.txt file that disallows the Flash pages in order to ensure that the Google Bot doesn't recognise those pages as duplicate content.
   
4. Finally, one solution I’ve seen which is really cool is to get your developer to set up a form of cloaking, where if a human comes to your site (using a browser), the human is sent to a flash version of your website. If the ‘user’ is a robot, then it’s directed to an HTML version for proper indexing.
   
   One such example successfully using this system is www.rothelowman.com.au.
   
   While cloaking is generally frowned upon by search engines, if it’s done ethically you’ll be ok. Bruce Clay (SEO guru) recently mentioned at the Search Engine Boot Camp that he had spoken to the good people at Google about this solution and was given the nod that it was ok. However, it was only ok provided the content of your HTML version was exactly the same as the content of your Flash-only website.