I have seen some seriously cool websites out there. Some of the cooler sites I have found have been completely flash. You know, those really jazzy sites with lots of stuff moving around, sounds coming from it, videos streaming away….

Let me tell you a little something about flash. Flash does not work like html websites, of which search engines like. Search engines do not like flash. In fact, flash isn’t considered in most search engine indexing. It’s ignored. Indexing just means the little robots that go through your site and take note of what’s there and make it show up when someone searches for it. The robots can’t seem to read it and make heads or tails of it.

As you can start to see, that’s a problem if your site doesn’t come up or it’s too deep in the results because the search engine doesn’t really pay attention to it. A flash site doesn’t have pages per say so it misses out on the use of engine friendly tags traditional websites use. Flash pieces can be embedded into these html pages for a nice effect and not handicap the search results. The full flash site actually defies search engine agorithims almost like the engine is an enemy, which isn’t good.

If the search engines think you are an enemy, then good luck having people see your site. Think about what you do when searching for stuff on the web. You go to google or yahoo, enter your search phrase hit enter and wait for your results to pick from. Out of the first page, you pretty much only pick out of the first few results, if one of those doesn’t work, you scan down the rest of the page to see if anything else jumps out at you, take note of all the pages of results that came up with a ‘next’ button at the bottom of the page, you don’t bother with them and finish with a glance to the right, spotting the results listed vertically. That’s it, done looking, time for a new search. Most people just don’t use or find the results in the ‘next’ pages credible. Unfortunately a full flash site may end up way down the line somewhere in those ‘next’ results.

So you see that optimizing a full flash website for people to use and find is tricky. I’m not saying it can’t be done, there are advanced search engine optimization (SEO) methods that can be used at a pretty steep cost, but still can’t compare to traditional page tags.

Basically a decision must be made based on your situation. If you get most of your website business from some method where most your visitors know your website address and enter it directly and there is no need for optimization, great, go for the full flash.

For right now until flash and search engines start playing nice together, if you depend on the search engines to display your site, then you really should think twice about a full flash website even though it may be tempting.

My opinion is to just use bits and pieces of flash embedded into a traditionally developed website.