Flash is great for many purposes from simple animations to movies and web applications. It brings rich media to the Web and could enrich user experience. In fact, IDC and NPD Online Research says that Flash is installed and turned on in 99 percent of browsers.

The problem is, the use of Flash can be quite a pain for search engine optimization.

Just not so long ago, the best practice is to avoid using Flash entirely. Sometimes, this is something outside our “circle of influence.” The second best option is, of course, to find a workaround for it.

Why Flash is Bad

Flash is known to harm search engine visibility. The main problem with Flash is that it is a binary file format, so it is much harder to analyze than text and static content. To understand what’s in the file, search engine needs to understand the format. This is something that may or may not be included as part of search engine features.

Macromedia (and now Adobe) understands the this concern and work out a solution so that search engine could analyze Flash objects. Google, for example, currently indexes Flash pages, but with a catch.

Google indexes pages that use Macromedia Flash. However, our crawlers may experience problems indexing Flash pages. If you’re concerned that Flash content on your pages may be inhibiting Google’s ability to crawl your site, you may want to consider using a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site. If features such as Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

While Google integrates the capability to index Flash pages, still textual content is what Google prefers over any other type of content.

The Rule of Thumb for Using Flash

The best practice when it comes to using Flash for web design can be summarized into three words: less is better.

It is best that in the same page as the Flash objects also include text content. There are many ways to achieve this, as you will see later.

Long Flash message forces visitors to wait. This is exactly the opposite of people’s behavior online. They may develop the same behavior as they have with banner ads, if not done correctly. This in turn will impact the ability of your web page to deliver the right message.

Another reason why you should keep Flash content at the minimum is bandwidth consideration. Although broadband penetration is going high, there are also a lot of dial-up users out there. So, consider this if they are your target market. At least if you are to publish web content, optimize it.

Use Flash to enhance the story instead of the only tool to deliver the message. Used wisely to complement existing content, Flash could bring great experience to web visitors.

In the next blog post, I will show you different ways how you can get the most out of both world, i.e. using Flash on a page and at the same time provide Google with the content you would like to be indexed.