Flash
Web
designers love Flash because it sets them free to do a lot of very cool art
stuff.
Search
engines usually ignore Flash pages and most humans actually dislike visiting
Flash web pages.
Typically
the only two people happy with a Flash presentation are the web designer and
the web page owner. The general public tends to almost always shun and avoid
Flash-based web sites.
Yes,
there are special exceptions.
The
Comedy Central television show “South Park” was originally created in Flash. If
you are creating animated entertainment, such as a television show, then Flash
may be a very appropriate tool.
Flash
is also excellent for training “films”. In this case, you don’t actually want
the general public visiting your web site. You might even have electronic
barriers that securely keep the general public away from your corporate
training site.
There
are other specialty cases where Flash is the correct tool, but for the vast
majority of web sites all Flash does is keep visitors away from your web site.
How search engines work
Titles
The
first search engines only catalogued the titles of web pages. So, if your search
included topics or keywords contained in an article but missing from the title,
the search engines wouldn’t actually find the web page you wanted.
While
search engines now catalogue entire web pages, the title remains an important
part of the search process.
Search
engines give more weight to the words in the title of an article than anywhere
else on the web page. Because of this, it is important that you place the most
likely keywords into your title.
But
you do need to be careful about overloading your title with too many keywords.
Early
search engines noticed that unworthy webpages often overloaded their titles
with lots of keywords, often unrelated to the actual web page.
Search
engines will donwgrade you for titles that are just long lists of keywords and
for titles that include keywords that don’t appear anywhere else on your web
page.
Also,
many search engines will show your title in their results. A good title can
help humans pick your web page out of the crowd, while a bad title (especially
a keyword filled title) can drive away potential visitors.