Object Tag not matter?

[DrBluto]

About a year and a half ago my boss came to me and asked that I look into having our website redesigned. I did my research on local firms, learned all I could about SEO (without getting into the programming) and came up with a site map, new content and concept page designs. Keep in mind, web development, SEO and the like was not anything I have done in the past, I was an IT recruiter and was recently moved into the role of Resource Development Manager.

One of the main things I had learned about SEO (one of many) is that Flash is not the best way to go about getting better ranking with search engines. Now, our site has a lot of flash on it and I made sure to point out that we had better alternatives than to use flash. Also, based on our front page, you couldn't tell what our company does. The site was (and still is) not the most informative plot of webspace.

Nothing has changed, but I did have our web developer create a new page for us. At the top of the page is yet another flash animation with the content below that. I had asked that our developer turn that flash into a jpeg. He replied to me saying that search engines skip over the OBJECT tag so it wouldn't do anything for us. It was my understanding that the engines see all and that it would be best to not have flash on the page, especially at the top. Who is correct?

Thanks for your time!

Aaron

[Dani]

Search engines only read the actual HTML on the page. If you have Flash at the top, that's fine. The search engines will just skip over it. They would do the same with images - they don't have Artificial Intelligence bots that read text contained within images, so converting from Flash to a JPG wouldn't make a difference.

Flash should supplement the text on your site for the benefit of the user experience. However, you shouldn't include anything in the Flash that you would want the search engines to be able to read or follow in any way.

[DrBluto]

Thanks for your help!