Adam T. Sutton

Flash, Images and SEO: How to Keep the Benefit

February 16th, 2009

If you love Flash or SEO, keep an eye on our search newsletter. A two-part report that describes how to reconcile the two opposing forces should be published in the coming weeks.

I found a ton of great information while researching the article. Some of it just didn’t fit. One interesting tidbit involves the value of images in search engines.

The images on your website are valuable. One benefit is that they can drive traffic from image searches — such as Google’s — to your website. However, if you’re a big Flash user and do not back up your images in HTML, then you lose that benefit.

I realized this while talking to Brian Ussery, Director of SEO Technology, Search Discovery. Brian has done some serious research and writing on Flash and SEO. He pointed out that if you search for “Adobe,” Flash’s inventor, in Google’s Image Search, you’ll see several versions of Adobe’s logo. However, not one result on the first five results pages is from Adobe’s website (as of this posting).

Adobe has HTML versions of its online content, and its homepage comes up as the number one result for “adobe” in regular search. So, I can’t say whether its site is too reliant on Flash to be effective in SEO. I simply don’t know. The example is not intended to bash Adobe, but to make a point: Using only Flash to display images can kill their visibility in search.

Adam T. Sutton

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Search Marketing Tags: , ,



  1. seo king
    October 30th, 2011 at 15:14 | #1

    Hi,
    Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.

    seo king

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