Anybody who knows us knows that we love WordPress..  Flash,  not so much..

The Flash SEO help-page on the main site is actually one of our most Google-trafficked pages, there’s a surprising amount of people out there wanting to know how to SEO their Flash websites and with good reason as it’s still pretty hopeless without a lot of help.

WordPress however, we love for a variety of reasons, but mainly because of it’s awesome SEO capabilities when used correctly. But SEO for WordPress is the same as SEO for anything else, it requires at least some knowledge of SEO.

Because the general public now seem to be aware of WordPress’s SEO power on well built sites, there is also a general mis-conception that all you have to do is use WordPress to build your site and it will do it all automatically for you. This is incorrect, and it won’t.

We’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again, good SEO starts long before you think about what you are going to build the site in, because every action you take in building and structuring the site will affect it’s SEO performance, so throwing it up randomly with no seo planning or strategy in advance will not work, whatever platform you build it on.

WordPress does however at least give you the opportunity to plan and build a search engine (super) friendly site, Flash in general does not.

So when we started hearing about “FlashWordpress” from customers..

“it looks like Flash, but because its WordPress it’s SEO friendly”

..was the impression they have been given, alarm bells obviously rang loud, and there were unpleasant visions of leagues of prissy Flash Evangelists  all planning to contaminate WP with their Flashy SEO kiss-of-death.

Happily, after digging about a bit,  in general we were fairly pleasantly surprised by the shotgun marriage of WP & Flash  (in most cases, not you numpty) and would go as far as to say some of the WP themes & free XML scripts are pretty good.

There’s lot of pre-made themes featuring Flash banners and displays, most of them of course are just embedding Flash into WordPress and in this way it’s not possible to do too much harm to your site’s potential rankings, and there are also several plugins that allow you to do this nicely.

But the couple of  brainwaves out there thinking that showing the whole WordPress site through a Flash front end is the way forwards, well..  we definitely would not advise use of those for a business website that has to rank in search engines to sell for you.

If anybody is currently tempted by any kind of  FlashWordpress  creation we highly advise you to:

1. get a URL of a  running demo site from the developer
2. go here http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php and plug in the URL of the sample site.

If you can see the same written text on the Lynx viewer results as you can see on the demo site, then you’re OK.

Note** – You definitely also need to be able to see the full site navigation linking including widgets, tags, categories, comments, trackbacks etc on there too, just the on-page content is not good enough, it’s WordPress’ automatic internal ball linking system that when both configured and operated correctly gives it such phenomenal SEO power.

If however you just have a blank page, or some nonsense about the FlashWP interface they’re using or about needing to install Flash and none of the relevant site content, then these are definitely SEO lemons at their finest and if you need it to rank in Google, you need to decline this kind offer immediately.

Because although these Citric Flash creations obviously do give the user more control over their content than a standard Flash site does via an easy-to-use WP interface, it’s a pretty bad shot in your own foot to take a formidable WordPress SEO framework and spend a lot of time and effort designing a system to make it totally invisible to Google by showing it through Flash.

DOH!!

If you’re looking at one of these sites and are not sure of what you’re seeing please do feel free to hit us up on the contact form and ask us and we’ll advise, otherwise don’t come crying to us when your “WordPress” site is an epic SEO Fail.

SEO Ibiza is proudly powered by FlashWordpress without the Flash

the website might not be flashy, but the rankings certainly are..