WHY IS IT that some great looking websites just can't find their way to the top of Google?

One big reason is a thing called 'Flash'.

A Flash website is typified by movement - chunks of text flying in and out, moving graphics - that sort of thing.

Nothing wrong with that.

At Krann, we love Flash websites - the problem is, Google doesn't.

The reason why is simple - Google reads code - it simply can't appreciate the beauty of a nicely animated logo.

If your whole website is animated as a Flash movie, Google will look at it in the same way we might look as a can of film on the shelf of a movie library - we don't know what it is until we project it onto a silver screen.

Code Comfort

The amount of code required on a Flash website is tiny - just enough to tell your browser 'here is a movie, play it'.

A non-Flash or HTML-based website is more like a movie script - every word, entrance, exit, prop description is there on the page. It may be more fun for us to hear Humphrey Bogart say to Ingrid Bergman: 'Here's looking at you kid' but Google just doesn't 'get it'.

Google: Show me the Script

Krann recently completed work on a site for Stockport-based Garage and concrete building installer Prestige Garages. Prestige had a perfectly good Flash website. Perfectly good, except that it was virtually invisible to Google.

Krann simply 're-imagined' the site in HTML. HTML is the code which Google loves because it can read everything the human eye reads (and more besides). It is from this information that Google can rank the pages appropriately in terms of usefulness and relevance for particular searches.

In Prestige's case, we want the site to rank highly for something like 'Garage Fitters in Stockport' or similar.

At the time of writing, we are waiting for Google to spot the new site and rank it higher than it used to. We wait and see what happens in the coming weeks and we'll update this article when we get some good news. Stay tuned!