Adobe Flash is a popular web development tool that is used to add animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash offers web designers and developers an arsenal of functionality that is seemingly not possible to achieve with standard HTML and JavaScript. However, this added flare does not come without its limitations.

Firstly, Flash requires the installation of a browser plug-in to display its content, but the browsers that support it are mostly limited to personal computers. So a flash heavy website will not display correctly for other devices with web browsers, such as cell phones, PDAs or some of the most popular gaming systems.

Secondly, it is still unknown how well Flash based content gets indexed in search engines. Traditionally, Flash based content was ignored by all search engines. Although Google and Yahoo have announced that they are able to index flash content, the SEO benefits and success have yet to be proven. Some common things we see from our clients are the use of Flash as their primary navigation source. If your primary navigation is contained within a Flash movie, then you need to consider an html based alternative. Probably the best use of Flash, in our opinion, is for rich banner ads, or aesthetic elements that do not rely heavily on important content.

However, if you need to put your content in a Flash movie, there are a few things you can do to help the search engines along. One solution would be to offer alternate content on the page for those users who do not have the Flash plug-in. Another solution involves adding the text content that’s in your Flash movie to an HTML div tag. You can then use a little JavaScript to have both the search engines see the text based content and the end user view the Flash movie as you intended. There are some good articles on the web about how to achieve this and we strongly advise that you implement either solution if you need to build an all Flash website.

Overall, if you are concerned about search engine rankings and you have a content rich website, it is best not to design an all Flash site. If you still want to go down that route, make sure you have an alternative html option, such as those listed above, so search engines will play well with your website. As of right now, it does not appear that you can have an all Flash website without some kind of supplemental solution. Only time will tell if Flash and SEO are truly good bedfellows.

A common SEO technique is to make sure the content of your web page is placed as close to the top of your HTML as possible. This will help ensure that your relevant content achieves higher priority by search engine spiders. ASP.NET provides a great framework for developing feature rich web applications, especially with the addition of view state. View state gives web forms the ability to persist changes across postbacks. Other web scripting languages are not able to accomplish this easily, however, this benefit may have some negative SEO implications.

The view state of a page is placed by default in a hidden form field named ___VIEWSTATE at the top of the html source code. The contents of the __VIEWSTATE form field contain serialized information, which can get very large (tens of kilobytes), about various controls on the web page. When a web page does not have a lot of controls using view state, the hidden form field will look something like this…

… which is probably fine at the top of the page. But, often times a web page may have numerous controls, no matter how much it is optimized to minimize view state, which produce a view state value that looks something like this…

… actually it could go on and on. This particular view state sample (this is just a small portion) was 10 pages long! Needless to say, you don’t want that to appear before your precious web page content.

There is an easy way to move the __VIEWSTATE form field to the bottom of the html source code. By pasting the following VB.NET code, “as is”, into your web form, the view state will be moved to the bottom of the html source code right above the closing </form> tag…

Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)<br />
Dim stringWriter As System.IO.StringWriter = New System.IO.StringWriter<br />
Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)<br />
MyBase.Render(htmlWriter)<br />
Dim html As String = stringWriter.ToString()<br />
Dim StartPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("<input /><br />
If StartPoint >= 0 Then<br />
Dim EndPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2<br />
Dim viewstateInput As String = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)<br />
html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)<br />
Dim FormEndStart As Integer = html.IndexOf("") - 1<br />
If FormEndStart >= 0 Then<br />
html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, viewstateInput)<br />
End If<br />
End If<br />
writer.Write(html)<br />
End Sub

Now when you browse your web page, the __Viewstate hidden form field and its ridiculously long value, will be at the bottom of the page, and your precious content will be closer to the top, just how the search engines like it.

The constant buzz about Web 2.0 technologies, might lead one to believe that all Web 2.0 technologies are well suited for ideal search engine optimization. That’s not entirely true. One such technology that comes to mind is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). As you browse the web these days, you will no doubt encounter many web sites implementing AJAX technologies. AJAX is basically a set of web technologies, based on JavaScript, that allow parts of a web page to communicate with the web server without refreshing the entire webpage as a whole. The end goal is to allow web applications to behave more like traditional desktop applications. Although AJAX can be used for many other things, that is what is was designed for, and in my opinion, what it is best at.

Since AJAX is based on JavaScript, you should be aware that like JavaScript, AJAX and most search engines don’t play well together. This means that you need to consider whether or not AJAX is the right solution for your needs. Consider this issue that we faced not too long ago. We have a client who wanted to display tabular data. When you clicked on a tab, corresponding information would be loaded into the panel below. There are many common ways to achieve this using AJAX, but the thing is, the search engines are only seeing whichever panel of information is displayed when the web page is initially loaded. With this kind of solution, when a tab is clicked, a request is made to the server and the data is returned just to that panel, without refreshing the entire webpage. So if you have 5 tabs, only the first one will be indexed, and the other 4 will not. A spider will not execute the JavaScript call that loads the information for the other tabs, so, that content you wanted to get indexed, well, just won’t.

We realized that AJAX was not the best solution for displaying tabular data and explored another search engine friendly alternative, JQuery, which proved to have better SEO results. I am by no means slamming AJAX. I actually love and use it all the time, but I don’t think it’s applicable in every situation. You should not choose to implement a technology because it is a buzzword. But rather, make sure you are using the right tool for the job.