Image Forward - Internet Marketing

Historically, spiders and bots have not been able to ready anything related to Flash. So, designing in Flash has been a very poor practice for any business that wants or needs to be recognized and highly ranked by Search Engines. Additionally, Flash pages or pages with large or multiple Flash components often take too long to load.

You might ask ‘Why would long page load times negatively affect my site’? Most web visitors click away from a site in five to seven seconds. Likely in the 75 to 80% range for many web sites and to further support that, take a look at your “time on site” stats within your web logs or on Google Analytics. Aside from usability issues, search engines are less likely to crawl, index, and rank sites - if they take too long to load or the file size is too large.

Doesn’t current technology with web 2.0 and the social media movement change SEO? Not overall - search engines still deliver the vast majority of web traffic. Some search engines can read elements of flash files but they still can’t read images and movie related code. For now.

So what is the worst use of Flash? By far - Splash pages! It’s almost 2008 and Flash Splash pages should not exist in this era. You only have seconds to capture the attention of a web visitor and a Splash page is just an extra click, extra load time … to get your web visitor to your real content. Don’t waste your time or money on Flash splash pages.

Short answer: Flash is not good for website desiring Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing or Internet Advertising