If you’ve been following JD’s blog regularly, you’ve read lots of tips for improving your website for SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the secret sauce that can help you get your website to the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing (the big 3).  Unfortunately, most SEO doesn’t work for the beautiful all-flash websites that I see many photographers have started using.

Why?

95% of all flash websites are invisible to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Do you have an all-flash website? Not sure? Here’s an easy experiment I’d like you to do:

1. Open your website home page in any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.).

2. Under the Internet Explorer page menu click “view source”, or in the Firefox view menu click “page source”. Don’t worry about hurting your website – you cannot make any changes to it from inside the new window.

3. You will see lots of computer code. Don’t panic. You’re looking for meta tags on the top of the page. Look for the words “meta name=description” and “meta name=keywords”. Also something called “Title”. This is what Google reads to figure out what your website is all about.

4. Next, scroll down through the page and look for any readable text. Since you’re a photographer, you should be able to read full sentences with words like “photography”, “weddings”, “seniors” or “portraits”. For extra credit, you should also be able to read your studio’s name, address, and phone. Click here for more info on picking keywords.

5. If you can read text on your web page after steps #3 or #4 above, congratulations. You’ve got a web site Google can search. You’ve passed the test.

6. If you cannot read text on your web page after steps #3 or #4 above, now you should panic. Chances are you have an all flash-based website. If you can’t read the text, neither can Google or the other search engines.

Flash images and slide shows on a website are beautiful. I recommend them. But if you want your customers to find you on Google, an all-flash website doesn’t help your SEO.

Update:

Here’s an example of a flash-based website so you can see what one look like. I picked it at random off the internet, so if you’re using this template I apologize in advance.

Tags: website

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 3:04 pm and is filed under website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.