Flash websites are what many would call the 'in-thing' these days. The reason for this is very simple. Such sites are usually very appealing to visitors. The fact that a lot of animation can be used makes it fun to visit such sites; they aren't boring at all. Apart from the fun aspect, they also make it much easier to use a site. When you use Flash media as a basis for designing your website, you make the usability of such a site better than if you had used ordinary HTML in designing it.

This, however, presents a big problem for the search engines. In order to understand this, you must have an idea of how search engines analyze sites. In order to find out the details about a site, search engines normally send out robots to read the individual pages in the site, and then check issues such as how many links lead from the site, the quality of content on the site and also the keyword density. Such a process is known as 'crawling'. Such crawling is best done when it's performed on HTML-based content.

Since Flash media is based on different technologies, the search engine robots may have a bit of a problem when analyzing a site that is predominantly designed using Flash media. They find it hard to get the content from such a site. This may have the effect of making your page rank very low. Even though you may have very good content with optimal keyword density and a wonderful overall design, you might find that your page rank is low as the search engine robots don't see much of this. Search engines have undergone an evolution to become better at handling such sites but they are still far from optimal. This leaves the burden of 'helping' such robots on the web master.

There are several things that you can do to optimize SEO with Flash. The first of these is that, as much as possible, you should try and minimize the use of Flash. You can use Flash for such aspects, as a few eye-catching animations, some video content and even an interactive game, but the majority of the site should be in the more traditional formats, such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. This will make it much easier for the robots to find the content in your site, and you would get the page rank that you deserve.

Another option would be to create two versions of the site. One would be in Flash, and the other would be HTML-based. In this way, you would make it easier for any visitor (including the search engine robots) to find content in a format that they can easily read. Doing all this work may seem too tiresome for a website owner, especially considering the fact that they may have other things to do. In such a case, it would be a very good idea to find a competent SEO company to do the work for you. A reputable SEO company would be able to optimize your Flash website without compromising on the beauty of Flash, meaning that you would benefit from the best of both worlds.