If you’ve ever visited a website with a video or elaborate animation streaming in the banner at the top, that’s known as “flash.” While a flash website can be gorgeous to look at (or sometimes not), having a site heavy in flash is useless if you want to get visitors from the search engines.

To understand why, you need a basic understanding of how websites are ranked for placement in search results.

Imagine Google sending out thousands of ‘spiders’ to search every web page on the Internet for a phrase you enter in your search bar. Let’s use the phrase ‘home stager‘ as an example.

When you search for ‘home stager’, Google sends out its spiders to find out which websites are most relevant to that phrase and those are the sites sent to the top of the list of search results. Nobody knows the exact algorithm Google uses to rank sites (and it changes often to help ensure a level playing field for all of us), but we do know for sure those spiders are first scouring content towards the top of web pages to find content matching the search phrase. They may or may not look a bit further into your content to see how relevant your site is to the phrase ‘home stager.”After all, there are over 4.6 million listings for this phrase and Google will give them to you in a ranked order in just 0.30 seconds!

To create flash animation, there is a lot of code involved. So much that those spiders searching for home staging might not bother looking past all of it to find out whether your site is relevant to home staging or not.

Pretty for the sake of being pretty is fine for interiors – not for your home staging website if you want to be found online!

Keep in mind that your web designer is probably not an SEO expert so don’t leave it up to them to tell you what will or won’t be good for getting traffic to your site unless they are a trusted expert in this area. Unfortunately a lot of web designers just like playing with flash and if they don’t know anything about SEO, they may actually think they’re doing you a favor by giving you a fancier site.

When you get a listing on the Staging Diva Directory, you’ll be getting an optimized web presence and I’ll be providing you with an important inbound link if you already have a website – even one that has flash. And those incoming links – links to your website from other, reputable sites – are another thing those spiders are looking for to determine whether your site is relevant, by the way!

Did you realize having one of those animated sites could harm your efforts of being found online? Do you have questions about the chances of your site being found by search engines that I could address in a future post? Please comment below!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould’s mission is to inspire people to follow their dreams. She developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Courses to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

[tags]home stager, home staging, home staging directory, staging diva, home staging training, home staging business, home staging website[/tags]