The Internet is made of billions of digital resources. Among all types of medium, the first and foremost category is made of HTML pages, the only universal format recognized by all search engines. Some also support a second category PDF files and various multimedia formats but those won't do much for your overall ranking. There is a third category too often overlooked, that is flash-based and dynamically-generated pages.

There would be little sense in trying to entice search engines in referencing your shopping cart or dynamic application pages. Actually, it's almost impossible.

When a search engine spider encounters a URL that looks like http://www.company.com/login.php?ID=b8e4jhk546lko54oabf044cdb5 or any occurrence of "cgi-bin", "pl", "?" or "&" in the address, it simply is going at the very best to skip that page. In most cases spiders usually follow HTML links to crawl web sites so chances are valid, even optimized pages may never be indexed because of your dynamic pages. This is of course a major issue for portals, web-based database systems, even ASP or PHP web pages, not mentioning e-commerce applications.

So is it possible to have both user-friendly and search engine compliant dynamic web sites? Fortunately the answer is yes! We can hide certain pages or sections from search spider to avoid malfunctions. In most cases we can also set up server-side configuration scripts to adapt URLs on the fly to match search engine requirements.

Since it first came out Macromedia Flash and its little brother Shockwave plug-in have imposed themselves as the leading web multimedia tool. Not all sites bear Flash-heavy pages intended for broadband users. Leading online web sites have long recognized the superiority of multimedia over traditional banners. In fact it(s so subtle than most times the only way you can tell it's flash is because it just looks so great.

But search engines are poor judges of esthetic matters. They will completely ignore any flash-based content in their hunger for pure text content. There are ways to make your site search engine-friendly without tampering with your web structure or layout. So you don't have to choose between useful and beautiful.

For those of you new to Flash or worry about its technical implications for your marketing strategies, hear both sides of the story:

Jakob Nielsen on uses and abuses of Flash

Macromedia Flash Usability Study