SEO and Flash Websites

I've been doing a lot of SEO recently, and thought I would share something of possible interest. In setting up this site I found myself indexing the websites of over 1,600 UK pr agencies and the results surprised me somewhat.

About two years ago I found that somewhere around 20% of pr agencies (which includes much smaller freelancers) in the industry had websites which were built entirely in flash. Worse still, some of these companies had sites which launched in another window from an initially 'blank' page. After performing the research again recently I found that about 10% of PR companies have flash websites.

So the number has roughly halved. Now whilst the major search engines - google, yahoo, msn and ask - have made efforts to start looking into flash movies for content, they still can't full index the site structure and all of the content and accurately determine its relevancy.

Some companies want to produce very good-looking brochure sites - after all, they are promoting services that cry out for good looking designs (especially if they are in marketing also), but it is possible to create a website which is both useful, indexable, and good-looking.

Think fit-for-purpose, think about what the user wants to see, and the information they want to get from the site. Too many people build their websites to be good looking and don't really think about what their target audience wants to do when the are on the site.

I found that lots of companies have contact forms that require the user to fill in details about themselves and press a button - with no privacy policy explained I have no idea what's going to happen to my details.

All I wanted was a telephone number! I want to speak to a real person.