Jonathon Mccray's Site

Many web pages nowadays are embellished with flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology allows, in a very simple manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages.
Of course, these animations have some influence on the way your site is "seen" and indexed by the search engines. The problem of Flash Search Engine Optimization arises, which is a very serious matter in terms of conversion and web site profitability.

What Are Flash Animations?
Flash files carry the extension .fla. For example a file might be named banner.fla where the .fla represents the flash format extention. The file will then need to be exported into a Shockwave Format (extension .swf) for use on the web page.
If the animation you have created contains text, it won't be taken into account by most of the search engines, as they don't pay much attention to this format. Still, there are search engines (e.g. Google, dir.com, FAST Search) that know how to read the text inserted in the Flash animations. A web page (or even a site!) that is built entirely in Flash will therefore pass almost "unseen" by search engines, which index, almost exclusively, text content in HTML format. Nevertheless, the HTML file that launches the Flash animation will be crawled by search engine's spiders.

Why Use Flash for Sites?

Due to the limited content contained on sites built entirely in Flash search engines will have difficulty indexing them and will therefore avoid these sites. Additionally spiders are not abIe to read the content of a .swf file. Some webmasters use flash to build mini-sties for specific campaign sites.

Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:
The impact of animation is maximized with flash and this improves the web's interactive and visual environment.
Flash combines well with other technologies like php, mysql, xml, video, sound etc. This makes it possible to include flash in a completely dynamic website.

Pros
More content can be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
It is an easier way to present slide shows or movies.
Flash is ideal for creating banners, ads and flash videos.
It's a good instrument for creating great visual impact and drawing attention to specific points of interest on a web site.

Cons
Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth and take a long time to load.
Most search engines don't like and don't index Flash.
You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers - if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won't be able to make any changes and you will have to pay them for modifications
The "Back" button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords won't approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash doesn't care about the visitors' needs - movies that seem endless- sounds that you cannot turn off they will drive your visitors away.
Splash Pages will reduce your visibility in the search engines especially if there is insufficient text on the site that can be used to identify the keywords associated with your products and services.
It is not an easy task to optimize flash for the unpredictable search engines. The amount of time and energy it takes for SEO for Flash websites is far greater than the efforts required for an HTML site.