Note – This is part II of my series on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Relationship Between SEO and Flash. You can read part one here.

Indexation and Ranking

With Flash, there are two very different issues at hand, indexation and ranking. Indexation referrs to having search engines index your Flash and add it to their index. Similar to how books are indexed at the library. Ranking refers to where a website shows up in the rankings of a results page after a search has taken place.

First things first, you must get your Flash website listed before you can start to worry abour ranking, so lets start there. For starters, let me say that I’m going to concentrate on Google for most of this but that doesn’t mean the information contained in this post doesn’t pertain to the other two major engines as well.

How A Flash Website is Indexed By Google

Indexation is obviously important because you won’t show up on search engine results pages (SERPS) unless Google was able to successfully crawl through your website. Not only that, the more pages you have on your website, the more content there is for Google to index. The more pages from your site that Google indexes, the higher your chances are of ranking for a relevant keyword.

One of the biggest draw backs to having a website built entirely out of Flash is that you reduce your chances of being indexed down to one. That’s it, just one. Uno. Singular. As it stands right now, the only page that will be indexed (error free anyway) is the HTML page your Flash is embedded in.

So this answers one of the myths out there. If someone told you that you won’t get into Google because you run an all Flash website, they are wrong. Yes, you can still get indexed and rank very well with an all flash website. But like everything else, there is a catch. You get one shot at it, and that’s it. Let me show you what I mean.

The image above shows two very basic website structures. They both provide the same amount of information in the same architecture that includes a home page and four information pages. The first is made with only HTML. It has a home page with four other pages under it. Each of these pages are crawlable and will get indexed as long as everything is put together in a search friendly way. The second website is built with Flash that loads the home page and changes to display an information page when a user clicks on a link within the Flash movie. As you can see in the image, unlike the HTML website, the Flash website is all housed within one HTML page. That means Google will only crawl one page instead of five. So in this instance, the HTML website will have five times the information indexed than the Flash site. Because of that, it also means the HTML site has five times the amount of visibility to customers who may search for the services provided on that website. Is that a risk you want to take? Is it worth the usability you gain with Flash? Now, before you freak out and decide to re-design your site with HTML, let me say that there are very good reasons for using an all Flash website so don’t be so quick to change things up. Ultimately though you are truly the only one that can answer these questions.

How To Find Out If Your Site Has Been Indexed

Finding out if your website has been indexed by the major search engines is pretty easy and the same search will work on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. When you use this (its called an operator), it will list all of the indexed pages on your website. That is, all the pages from your website that the search engine is aware of and will list in their rankings. Remember, it will NOT show you where the pages rank for your keywords. It only shows a list of pages that have been crawled. Here it is:

site:domain.com (Example – site:serpable.com )

If you’re running an all Flash website, you’ll either see a big message that says they couldn’t find your website at all, or it will only list one or two listings depending on if you have any non-Flash content on your website.

NOTE! - Don’t be surprised to see different numbers in each. Remember that Google, Yahoo! and MSN are three very different animals. Each one runs their engine in a unique way. My suggestion would be to begin with Google, then after you’re happy with the number of pages indexed in Google, move on to Yahoo!, then MSN.

How Long Does It Take To Get Indexed?

The short answer is to expect a wait time of two or three weeks if you just put a Flash website up and wait for the search engines to find it without any type of pro-active strategy. However, there are ways to get your new Flash website indexed much faster.

Here are a few tips to get your site indexed quickly. Please remember, search engines update their systems frequently. These techniques may change and or become ineffective over night so don’t be disappointed if you don’t get the results you wanted to see right away. SEO is a long-term game and you should expect to be in it for the long haul.

  1. Build External Links: External links are links that point from someone else’s website to yours. Submit your website to the following free directories- photographydirectory.org, photographypros.com, submit an entry in thebestplacestophotograph.com, photoclicks.net, and the Yahoo! directory. There are more, many more. Use this search to find more free directories for you to submit to.
  2. Comment On Other Websites and Blogs: On most blogs, when you submit a comment, you’re asked to provide a link back to your site. Make sure your comments follow the two R’s (Real and Relevant).
  3. Become a part of the photo.net Family: If you haven’t found the amazing resources in photo.net, go check it out. Create a profile page that has a link to your site.
  4. Facebook: Create two things on Facebook.com. 1 – if you don’t have a profile on Facebook do that first. 2 – create a page. A page is like a profile for your business or services. That link will tell you all you need to know about how to build them and what they are.

Use those four tactics and it will help you get indexed much faster than not doing anything at all. If you didn’t notice, all four are based around getting links back to your site and creating a brand for your photography on the web.

Building links will help your website get indexed, but its also something you’ll want to continue doing as long as you are using your website as a marketing tool. But this isn’t the place to go into that. I’ll cover link building at another time.

Once Indexed, Twice Shy…About Ranking

Once your Flash site is indexed by all three search engines, you can not be shy about moving up in the rankings. To do so, you’ll need to aggressively go after what you want. In my next post I’ll talk about the factors that go into ranking, how to get ranked for the keywords you want to target, how to STAY in the rankings you want, and how Flash will impact your efforts.

If you haven’t yet, subscribe to the SERPable RSS feed and you’ll know right away when I post the third installment of this series.

Happy SERPing!

Levi