Adobe Flash. Is it the ultimate weapon of site destruction?

Years after years I find, during my SEO consultancies, web sites with extensive Flash navigation structures. No wonder the website owners are complaining about poor search engine ranking, low usability and high bounce rates.

Like everything Adobe Flash can be used in a harmless way, but in the wrong hands it can have devastating effects. Let’s see why.

Adobe Flash and SEO

At present there is no effective way to optimize Flash for search engines. The main problem is not that search engines cannot index Flash content; the real problem is that search engine spiders cannot identify the content structure. While in regular HTML you can structure keywords in a hierarchical way using semantic mark-up, in Flash this is quite difficult. Additionally it is difficult for search engines to determine what is visible and what is invisible to the end user. Since this could give way to “flash content spam”, search engines take the safe approach to give extremely low priority to flash indexed content.

To make things worse many designers make the mistake to bury text into images, making the indexing task from difficult to impossible. Maybe the worst possible error from designers is to bury links into Flash objects (the spider will follow the links conservatively). A Flash website navigation bar is the best way to prevent search engine from indexing your web site completely. Make no mistakes spiders will be able to follow links in Flash object, but the weight given to these links will be very low.

Flash is poorly used by designers

To make a website look ‘creative’ designers often embed animations and slideshows in many parts of the site, often reducing the usability and most importantly drawing user attention away from calls to action. No wonder one of the best ways to optimize a landing page is to remove useless flash animations.

The Flash intro horror show

Even though the practice is disappearing little by little, you still find a lot of websites with a completely unnecessary Flash intro that takes several seconds to load. No wonder the bounce rate of these pages is terribly high as users hit the back button rather than looking for the “skip intro” link (if it is there).

Is Flash a CPU hog?

Or better said “Multimedia is a CPU hog”. Multimedia and animations are always heavy on CPUs. In this Flash doesn’t particularly help. As in December 2010, in a world dominated by multi-core 64-bit processors, the official Flash player is still running in 32-bit. There is a new 64-bit version on the horizon that, we hope, will improve things.

No need to say that navigating Flash heavy websites is the best way to drain the battery of any mobile devices. Many designers in this are particularly guilty, as they take no steps to improve Flash objects efficiency.

On this ground Apple banned Flash from iOS (there are probably other reasons that have more to do with rivalry between Apple and Adobe).

Can Flash and SEO tolerate each other?

The answer is for sure yes. By embedding small contained flash objects within the HTML code and by using few precautions it will be possible to avoid most negative effects of Flash. You have to make sure to offer to search engines spiders an alternative object or link that it will be possible to index. Most of the time it will be just a matter of designing a functional web page and as a last step pasting the Flash object into the HTML code. Arguably you could even build a Flash navigation bar, as long as behind you place HTML navigation indexable by spiders.

Review of "The SEO Business Guide" from SitePoint

After more than 7 month of inactivity due to heavy workload I am restarting my blog.

Last month Sitepoint released “The SEO business Guide”.

SitePoint

For those who do not know SitePoint, it’s a company specialized in publishing guides and courses revolving around web design, web programming, web marketing and many other aspects of online business. The quality of their products makes them a rather authoritative source if you are planning to get any form of education in these fields.

The Book market related to SEO

The SEO book market is crowded with a massive quantity of beginner level books repeating the same platitudes (often out-dated) about search engine optimization. There are few advanced-level SEO books on the market but these are quite a rarity as the topic is moving very quickly. An advanced-level book can get out of date in less than a year.

This SitePoint guide stand out from anything on the market because a large parte of the content is focused on setting up an SEO consultancy business. This is quite invaluable if you feel that your know how on SEO is high but you are afraid to make the plunge and start a business around it.

The book structure

The book is structured around 9 chapters and two appendixes.

Chapter 1. - Search 101: This is a basic introduction or refresher on general principles of SEO

Chapter 2.- Best-practice SEO: This chapter outlines the basic processes for building searchable content, create back links and improving your ranking.

Chapter 3. - Advanced Tactics: More on tools for keyword analysis and for maximizing your SEO results.

Chapter 4. - Enterprise SEO: Here are special suggestions for large sites, multilingual sites, branding and geo-targeting;

Chapter 5. - Paid Search: How to make Pay Per Click work synergistically with your SEO strategy

Chapter 6. - Local Search: Extending your SEO strategy to the local search marketplace;

Chapter 7. - Starting an SEO Business: This is the largest chapter of the guide. It focuses on starting the SEO business, the pricing strategies and how to find clients;

Chapter 8. - Leveraging Technology and Staff: How to automate the repetitive parts of the SEO process, and expanding the business;

Chapter 9. - Value-Added Services: Additional products and services that you can add to your portfolio.

Appendix A – Online Resources: Blog, guides, newsletters and other Resources for the most up to date information on SEO

Appendix B – Documents: This chapter is a list of templates for contracts, service agreements, client questionnaires and confidentiality agreements. All these documents are in soft format in the CD included with the guide.

The two last appendixes are extremely valuable. In particular appendix B is saving you days of hard work (and probably lawyers fees).

Is this book for you?

This book is for you if you are serious about SEO and you like the idea of starting your own business. You will find that the content is really unique and valuable.

This book is not for you if you just want a to do checklist in order to improve your ranking but you don’t have a lot of time or energy to dedicate to the task.

The guide cost $197 with free shipping worldwide. By purchasing the book you will have access to $150 of discounts on the SEO tools recommended in the guide. The book can be ordered directly from the SitePoint website.
In conclusion this guide is a must have if you are planning to set up your own SEO business.