Optimized Plastic Surgery Web Design Doesn’t Mix with Flash

Although Google recently announced that they were making progress when crawling through and extracting data from Flash-based Web sites, a news release such as this is rather misleading when heard by the untrained ear. For those plastic surgeons or specialized physicians who have legacy Flash Web sites, or for those who are in the market for contracting a Web redesign using heavy Flash components, we at cosmeticSEO.com urge you, as a medical professional, to educate yourself about the many pitfalls of Flash Web sites and their limited marketing effectiveness.

Flash Web sites are still composed of an entirely different architecture than regular HTML pages. The traits of search engine optimized code are not necessarily encoded properly in Flash Web sites, and in no way, can Flash perfectly imitate the time-tested techniques utilized when constructing valid and semantically correct HTML.

Although information contained within a Flash Web site will now be able to be read, it will, however, lack the proper markup that adds meaning for search engine spiders. Also, Flash Web sites typically occupy only a fraction of the total amount of pages that a regular site does. Most of the time, a Flash Web site is situated on just one Web page. This is ultimately detrimental for search engine optimization as the amount of pages on a given domain is an important metric when gauging your position in the search engine results pages.

Don’t bet on your Flash Web site improving in its crawlability if it relies on external calls to separate Javascript files and the like. Google will not recognize these references either.

Until more time passes and further research is conducted, look to use Flash only for small visual components of your Web site, if at all. Because of its dynamic, aesthetic properties, Flash can successfully cause a great emotional response from your visitors. Unfortunately, heavy flash use will also elicit an “emotional” response from search engine spiders – they’ll mark your page as unfit for their indices.

For more information on the proper techniques that you can use to bolster your cosmetic surgery practice Web site in the search engine results pages, browse through the informative articles in cosmeticSEO.com’s plastic surgery marketing kit or contact us at 404-536-2283.

Like this entry? Share it with your network.