It has become almost a norm for graphic and web designers to create their own sites in Flash. It is also fast becoming a trend with hotel sites, restaurants and many other businesses that don’t know much about SEO .

Flash is a programming language that creates stunning visual effects, but is really bad for business. Flash sites may look visually impressive but they get almost no organic traffic. They are impossible to index and therefore seldom make it to the top of the search engines. Google hates Flash. Bing is a bit more sympathetic towards it, but still gives it thumbs down. Flash sites don’t display on any Apple devices e.g. iPhones, iPads . Flash sites are not easy to maintain, so why would anyone want to go this route?

To illustrate my point, I have found a great live example (sorry Matthew):

URL:

http://matthewhutchison.com

Title:

Web Design Services for Small Business – Flash, HTML & CSS
Description:

For Amazing Graphic Design – Los Angeles and Worldwide. Hutchison Design Studio is an innovative graphic design firm that offers a wide variety of professional graphic design services as well as web design in Los Angeles.

Here are the SEO results of our quick ferreting work on this website:

Domain Age : Apr 06, 2004

Page Rank : n/a (not ranked)

Alexa Traffic rank :23, 391,786

Google Indexed pages: 3

Yahoo: 1

Bing : 4

Internal links: 0 (0 nofollow)

External links: 0 (0 nofollow)

Conclusion:

Nice site, not cheap to make and no traffic! If you absolutely have to use Flash, use it for a small portion of your website, eg. a header or a banner, but don’t forget about plain text. This is if you want to get more natural search traffic than our friend Matthew…

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