Martin Woods :: Motionographer Portfolio

Nofollow links are something which I have been thinking about more and more recently. I’m sure that there are a large number of people that will disagree strongly with me, but I am becoming more convinced that being over obsessed about not posting a quick comment on an relevant article is a lost opportunity in terms of SEO.
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Not so long ago (OK it actually is) clients used to ask “what’s this flash thing I’ve been hearing about”. Originally we used Macromedia’s Flash 2 as a new alternative to the gif format. The major draw back was most of the advertising agencies and affiliate schemes has heavy restrictions of its use: due to it not being widely pre installed plug-in with browsers.

Times changed as soon we we having companies wanting to impress their clients with whole flash sites. Now we seem to have back tracked on ourselves slightly after the mid nineties flash boom. Flash is still a powerful tool for both web design and development as long as designers and developers review how the site will be read by Google.  Dynamic readable content, text, tags, quality outbound links and alternative content.

Google now is able to read some Rich media such as Flash and can discover and index text, buttons, menus and links contained Flash websites and widgets. In fact nearly all text visible to the user. So with all the new algorithms of the Google search crawler designers shouldn’t have to worry about SEO in flash any more? No so. Flash sites still tent to be much more graphically orientated than non rich media sites so as designers we can do everything possible to limit the problems.

Google Best practices Guidelines for SEO for Flash and other Rich Media.

1. Try to use rich media only where it is needed.
2. Provide text versions of pages.
3. Consider using robots.txt to block the rich media files.

Google still suggests that Text is king, taking this into consideration as designers  we need to use as much text as possible to get our clients on top for organic search.

“Usability First”

With ever more devices to view web content, make purchases and socialise it seems hard to know what to design for. I recently had a very long conversation with a client about the advantages of design for SEO. Design does not have to be restrained by SEO. Nor do we have to design for Search Engine Optimisation. (or try to do both like BMW  Germany in 1996) The risk of the infamous Google ‘death penalty’ is something not to be taken lightly.

SEO and Design at the concept and planning stage.

Trying to tackle the problems of SEO at production stage is too late in a project, however from experience it is only in the past 2 years designers are really starting to design with SEO in mind. Still most designers will only think about H1 tags etc., Keywords and Meta tags during production.

Conclusion

If it can be produced in none rich media first this should be priority, but not at the cost of the creative design. If the creative rich media elements can be embedded using <swfobject> this should be considered and if the whole site has to be in flash then the above best practices should apply.