FLASH Can Significantly Hurt Your Online Visibility

FLASH is fun, cool, and can be used to make some pretty impressive presentations.

The problem is that is can very significantly hurt your online visibility - what I call your "findability factor."

All Flash sites, websites made entirely of Flash, are the kiss-of-death (IMO).

When brides can't find you online they don't stop looking.

Oh no, they find one of your competitors.

Search engine spiders, the automated programs that continuously scan web pages, don't deal well with Flash. They can't read it and as a result they can't determine relevancy and so can't index it.

I'd say a website made entirely of Flash probably has a 20% findability factor compared to a spider-friendly, HTML crawlable website.

Let me put it another way.

800 brides who were looking for you using a search engine last month couldn't find your website!!

80%, maybe even as high as 90%, of the brides who could have booked your services probably found and booked with someone else. Ouch!

The sort-of-maybe-good news is: a Flash site, when designed properly, can convert well.

Unfortunately, that's rare, based on what I'm seeing out there.

Can you afford to live on 20% of the brides out there who are looking for you? In today's competitive environment, I think the answer is "NO."

Bottom Line: All Flash websites will hurt your overall online findability factor. They are probably impossible to get top ranked for any competitive category (I haven't found one yet!).

In order to get brides to your website you'll spend more money to advertise and promote your website vs. a competitor who has a search engine friendly, top-ranked website.

If you have an all Flash website, consider advertising at my popular Wedding Planning Links website to address this problem and make it easier for brides to find you online.

Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com