Restaurants + Flash=Invisibility
First, I love Adobe Flash websites, especially for restaurants. As an ex chef, I really appreciate beautiful photos of food. Here are some high-end restaurants that use Flash beautifully in NYC: Jean-Georges Restaurant , Le Bernardin, Per Se and Daniel Boulud’s. Unfortunately not all restaurants should have a site created with just Flash. The reason for this is Flash sites are notorious for having difficulty with search engine optimization and high rankings. I have had heated discussions more than once with web designers/developers on why they should/should not use Flash for restaurants (unless the restaurant is really famous, in that case they can do what they want). I will first give the reasons why you shouldn’t use Flash, then I will talk about the things you can do if your site is a Flash website.
There are many reasons not to use Flash for your Restaurant website, but there are two big reasons for me. I usually ask a site owner if they want customers to be able to view their site on an Apple enabled device (ipod, ipad, iphone) , and they answer of course. The problem is Apple has blamed Adobes Flash player for causing most of their system crashes and thus will not support Adobe Flash. This is really unfortunate. Apple insists that blocking Flash is good for open web standards, and a lot of people are experimenting with HTML 5 as an alternative to Flash for its video player. The issue is neither Ogg Theora or H.264 has not dominated the marketplace as the web video standard. Interestingly, it is Apple who chose is championing H.264 rather than the open source Ogg video format. So Apple has chosen to push its own products (QuickTime player for one) and agendas above the good of an open standards format.
The second reason is Flash simply does not rank well in search engines, period. I will be going into this in more depth in part two of this article on Thursday. Flash will never be fully searchable like HTML. So if you really want higher ranking, you might have to consider doing the site in HTML.
So you now say, ok Paul, I have an Adobe Flash site, and I do not want to reinvent the wheel, so what do we do? Here are some steps to help the spiders for the search engines index some of your site.
1. Use what is called swfobjects. What this is JavaScript code you put on the site, so you can use div tags and html content which is search-able. This way you can put keywords into the text and use them in your head tags (H1, H2, etc..)
2. With the swfobjects you should have alternate content pages create, so you can add a lot of searchable content.
3. Use a single XML file to create the flash site and its alternate content. What this does is makes sure the alternate content is a perfect representation of your flash content. Plus you should use php (it outputs XML and HTML) to power it. The way you can tell is to disable the flash in your browser and see what renders. The problem is, if you do not have a lot of content, not much will be seen.
4. Your site should have deep linking, or what is called SWFAddress. This uses Actionscript to allow for bookmarks for different states of a flash page. remember Your site really isn’t a bunch of pages, like an html site, it is one big flash file. this swf address doesn’t help with SEO per se, but with usability. It helps with usability because it allows people to bookmark pages (states) and send links to people, which is helpful when you are doing social media.
5. Your site should have progressive enhancement, meaning if a person has a browser with html enabled, they can see the html version of your site. If a person has html, and JavaScript enabled, they will see the added functionality of the JavaScript. If they have, html, JavaScript and flash enabled, they get to see the whole flash site.
All is not lost though. One nice thing is as web standards progress, we are seeing a move to open-source functionality that mimics Flash. Meaning the newest versions of HTML 5, CSS 3 all have built in things to address this, so you do not need Flash. Plus a lot of open source libraries like JQuery does this. I just did an overhaul of my site at www.harrisonmarketingmd.com If you look at it, the header on the home page looks like flash gallery, but it’s not, its JQuery, which is fully searchable. I would recommend doing an HTML site, and use Flash if you want for slide shows of your pics. Or you can use HTML galleries.
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Phrase “ranks well” is undefined… start by looking at plausible customer queries, then look at competition in the source space for this. As Google Webmaster info notes, SWF format, like HTML, is indexed for text and internal links… the format is less important than the query, the competition, and the page metadata (TITLE, URL, incoming links, etc).
For example, query “restaurant ‘san francisco’” has much competition, and it’s difficult for any individual restaurant site to “rank well”. If you wish to rank well for query “yunnan restaurant ‘san francisco’” then you’d make sure your page title and other metadata accurately reflect the subject, and strive to get authoritative inbound links with “yunnan restaurant” as anchor text. Body text can help in this (whether HTML or SWF), but search engines use other criteria in addition to body text.
jd/adobe
Find me a fully enabled Flash website that ranks well. Read Part II of my blog, where I show people exactly can they can see Flash websites perform in search engines. As I said in my original post, there are things you can do to make Flash search able, but again, the search engines usually only index orphaned files. Flash websites are great for some business segments, but horrible for restaurants if you plan on having an SEO and mobile strategy.
This has made my day. I wish all ptosigns were this good.
[...] Why Restaurants Should Not Have a Website Created With Adobe Flash [...]
John,
Are you saying Flash sites rank well? I am writing part two of this blog on Thursday and will be putting some of this to the test. In all of my experience, I have never seen Flash sites rank well, period, except for maybe some obscure keyword phrase.
God help me, I put aside a whole afrtenoon to figure this out.
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Search engines have found static text and links within SWF for a decade, and started processing dynamic links about five years ago (they only recently started with Ajax links).
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35287
jd/adobe
Geez, that’s uneblieavble. Kudos and such.