Gaining high rankings on Google

If you do not need to use search engines as a promotion tool then we recommend using flash on your website as this can give your website a real professional feel. However, you should not expect particularly high rankings on search engines such as Google.

Google and many other search engines pretty much ignore meta tags within your HTML code and work by sending in a "crawler or bot" to your website and collecting information from the text that exists on each page. Flash is generally made up of images so this would mean that there would be no real text for Google to read if the whole page is flash based.

Flash can slow a website download speed and harm rankings

Even a flash introduction can do your search engine rankings harm. The first page shown of any site is known as the index page, the index page is generally the most important page on your website as search engines tend to "favour" these pages and display an index page higher up in the results than any other pages. In theory, if two web pages that are identical in every way were put next to each other on a search engine, except one was an index page and the other was a product page then the index page would be ranked above the product page, therefore if search engine ranking is important to you then using your index page to display a flash introduction is possibly wasting a good chance of having a top placement on the engines.

Using Frames in a Website

You can usually (but not always) identify a website that uses frames when the navigation stays fixed whilst the main body content has a scroller bar. Frames have several benefits, mainly the benefit of easier updates for web designers. We use frames ourselves in certain sections of this website but the use is very limited. If your whole website has been built using this method - this is very likely to be hindering the ability to get the whole of your website fully indexed. A lot of web design companies believe that this can be overcome by using a no frames tag within the code, but in our experience, this offers little in solving the known issues with framed websites.

Frames can and still do have a use in web design but if you are planning on using search engines for promotion then we recommend steering well clear of the use of frames. We have removed frames from a client website, then witnessed an 800% increase in traffic within 6 weeks.

Do you have a framed website, a website that overuses flash, or just a website that doesn't gain the high rankings or amount of business you expected? Contact us for a quotation to turn your website into something lost amongst the millions of others into something that leads the way.