Splash Page Mistakes

All of us do not know the term ‘splash page’ though many websites use splash pages. These intro pages designed to promote the website, the products or services it is selling and it is often used to announce something such as special offers or used as the first page where people can select language or country before proceeding further to the main site. It is an interesting concept but in terms of SEO it is not helpful. Sometimes it is not considered as user friendly as well.

It presents problem with usability. The splash pages are often developed in Flash and all of us do not use high speed broadband connection it takes a long time to load these splash pages and it may frustrate the user. It is not a very good idea if your product is new to the market and it has not gained any popularity or credibility, then people may not be patient enough to wait to watch the intro. You will discourage users visiting your website if you have splash pages because of the loading time.

When it comes to search engines they cannot index Flash so even if the users don’t mind waiting for your splash pages to load, search engines are not always tolerant to these pages and you will unnecessarily lose your listing. Lately the popular search engines have started indexing Flash content too but it is not yet fully effective and we stand to lose out on the effectiveness of indexing. Referencing the Flash content to words makes it difficult for search engines as Flash content have images or pictures whereas search engines have text based value system. The splash page will normally have very little of text which makes it less friendly to search engines. Splash pages do not have title tag and search engines give importance to title tags while indexing and referencing website. Splash pages mislead the search engines by having poor cross linking. In websites all the important pages are cross linked which gives the search engines a clue about the important pages of your website. Unless we give the search engines enough clues about the important parts of our website they will not be able to detect it automatically. So splash pages affect the overall optimization of the website. Moreover splash uses redirect to take the visitor to the main page and usually search engines do not prefer redirects and it will not index the splash pages. According to search engines the most important part of a website is its homepage and when that page is going to be a splash page the search engines are not going to index it and you will unnecessarily be put yourself to a disadvantaged position.

So it is better to avoid the use of Flash as much as possible. Add as much textual content as possible to make it easy for the search engines to index and reference the page. Make sure to include a static sitemap and link it with the homepage sitemap. Launch a strong campaign for link building and increase the number of inbound links.

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