Flash and SEO: Can they Co-Exist?
In the pharmaceutical web world, you are typically hard-pressed to find an agency or brand marketer that doesn’t want to integrate some level of Flash into their site. In my time, I have seen everything from recommendations to build a site entirely in flash to building a flash splash page to “wow” the users when they first enter. So the question comes up quite frequently – is flash really bad for SEO? Why do SEOs hat flash so much? To give the short answer, I personally am not opposed to flash when it makes sense and offers some important interaction/functionality. I am opposed to useless/non-functional flash that doesn’t bring value to a user’s experience…especially if that non-value addition negatively impacts the SEO value of a site.
When Flash and SEO Get Along
It is possible for flash and SEO to play nicely and actually achieve positive search engine visibility. From the pharmaceutical SEO perspective, I’ll take a hypothetical “patient tool” as an example. Let’s say this tool let’s the users do their own risk assessment by walking through a series of informational content followed by questions within a flash environment. This content within the flash element is likely content that will be valued by a SEO specialist, because it is content relating to highly searched key terms. So, if that’s the case, how can we make the flash element more SEO friendly?
It’s a simple concept (and not such a simple process, maybe). From a development side, we still need to create a unique URL for each and every page. Each page will have the flash element embedded in the page, with unique “SEO Friendly” content (i.e., text) optimized toward a specific phrase. Standard SEO principles apply for every page. The flash element would be pre-loaded to that specific page of content. I’m throwing out a theory here, not necessarily something that will work in every instance. This theory is derived from the Adobe SEO Technology Center.
Without re-iterating the entire concept, I’ll just content that flash and SEO can be friends and should be friends. For pharmaceutical web marketing, building fancy and helpful flash “tools” is something that is very common practice, so the concept of flash SEO should be of significant importance. Check out the below links for more details on Adobe SEO Technology.
Flash SEO Links
SEO Flash Platform
Flash SEO Videos
Search Engine Optimization for Flash
Deep-Linking with SWFAddress
