St. Louis Wedding Photographer

A few days ago I made a post that outlined problems with search engines ranking flashed based photography sites and I wanted to take some time to offer some suggestions on how to remedy this problem.  As I mentioned in the previous article, having a website built only on Flash will cause some big problems if you want to be found by search engines. 

So, what can you do to increase the likelihood of being ranked in the search engines?  There are few things:

• Offer a HTML based version of your site 
• Build your site so the interactive components are built on flash and the rest of the content is HTML
• Abandon the Flash and run a site driven by HTML, PHP, or another language that is more search engine friendly
• Separate your Flash photo gallery from the informational content

The biggest change you can make is to build a separate version of your photography site using HTML or another search engine friendly language.  Some sites will offer the option to choose a low bandwidth and high bandwidth version before you enter.  This is fine but make sure to put some useful content on that page.  Don’t just use a couple of images with links.  The engines need to have something to help them understand what your site is about.  It is wise to offer a text version of your navigation in the footer of the site. You can put the content and links "under the fold."  This means place it lower than what is visible when the page loads – you have to scroll to see it.

You can also build the site so that only the content that has to be interactive is built in Flash.  Build the rest of the content in HTML or PHP.  This keeps the majority of your site indexable.

I personally try to avoid Flash.  I find it annoying and while I used to be interested in using Flash, I have abandoned it all together and now operate on WordPress which uses PHP. 

If you want the interaction in your photo gallery, you could run a gallery that is built on Flash while the rest of the site is built on HTML or PHP.