Are you using flash banner ads on your website or in your emails? While flash banners look great and almost every browser can play the flash banner ads they still have a serious drawback. Search engines have a very difficult time figuring out what’s in a flash banner. If you are into using SEO to get traffic from the search engines you probably don’t want to use the flash banners for that reason.

If you plan on using flash for the banners on your website there are a few considerations to take into account. The longer your flash ad is the bigger the file size is going to be. The more colors you use the bigger the banner is going to be. You don’t want your flash banner ads file sizes to get so big it hurts your website or slows it down. I see flash ads that have file sizes bigger than the webpages we designed 5 years ago. Do what you need to do to keep the file size of your flash banners down to a reasonable size.

There are even more variations that can make a difference in the price you might pay. You’ll just have to check around to see what’s the best deal you can find. Yes, you can even find places that will put your banners up for free. Just do a search on banner exchanges and you’ll find a ton of places.

However, a note of caution. Google has some funny ideas about what they think is a good thing to do and what isn’t. Banner farms are one of the things they think aren’t so very good.

It’s a good idea to think about paying for your banner ads as you’ll get better placement and more than likely a lot better quality of traffic. Free is nice but if they don’t buy anything it’s a waste of time.