Our WebCEO Support Angels often receive SEO and SMO related questions and they do their best to explain search engine optimization basics, although their job is to specifically help you operate the WebCEO tools. We have decided to make these answers available to all of you by another channel as well. Meet our new blog-category “SEO in brief,” where we answer the SEO-related questions we get the most often.

Q: I was often told not to use Flash on my site, because Google cannot index it. Should I still stay away from it?

Googlebot can index almost any text a user can see as he or she interacts with any Flash SWF file on your site. Google can use that text to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. But this doesn’t mean all search engines can.

The best SEO tactic is to use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, while using HTML for content and navigation. This makes your website more SE-friendly. Also, using HTML for navigation allows users to send direct links to your content or bookmark it.

Google also recommends using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). sIFR is an open-source project, that lets webmasters replace text elements with Flash equivalents. Using this technique, content and navigation are displayed by an embedded Flash object but, because the content is contained in the HTML source, it can be read by non-Flash users (including search engines).