If you are worried at all about receiving natural traffic from search engines, you want to make sure your site is as ‘Search Engine Friendly’ as possible. With that being the case, search engines do not inherently see images and Flash. While engines may look at the ALT text in images and may read Flash files and get some text and links from them, they provide little benefit and wreak havoc on the organic rankings of a site.

Is there a happy medium between SEO and Aesthetics?
Of course there is! Obviously a site limited to text only is not attractive and can make it difficult to properly market your product/service, but that is not what I am recommending. The extreme example of what you should avoid is one of the Flash sites that were commonly setup a few years back. These sites usually had a long intro animation, and the entire navigation and content of the site was embedded in a Flash application. If your site falls into this category - you need to redesign it immediately.

An eye-pleasing Flash banner or animation can do wonders for promoting your product or service and make more a memorable presentation, but make sure there is plenty of text based content and the navigation of the site should be done using text as well (maybe a DHTML dropdown?).

How do I know what the engines see?
You can do this in the Google search results, but if you haven’t already, you should really
. Although some complain about the PageRank data it supplies as being outdated, I think it is helpful. Among other things, you can view PageRank data, look at cached version of sites, backlinks, etc.

Specifically to the toolbar, click on the PageRank button, then click ‘Cached snapshot of page’, then at the top of the page click the link that says ‘Show cached text only’. To accomplish the same thing in the search results, click the ‘Cached’ link under a listing, then click the ‘Cached text’ link.

The bottom line is, if you don’t see you target keywords/phrases here, then neither do the engines.