Mesmerizing interactivity offered by Flash web-sites runs the risk of being left completely inconspicuous since Flash web-pages do not rank well with search engines. This problem has been attracting attention of web-developers for quite a long time already and it seems that no perfect solution has been offered so far.

Does Google index your .swf files?
The frequent question “Does Google index your .swf files?” seems to have been answered by the company. “Google reads Flash, so optimize it” is the title of the post on the News.com. It describes how Google implements Adobe Systems’ Search Engine SDK technology. However, the results are not absolute and further improvements are awaited, but the web developers can start optimizing the content of the Flash sites. Another good tool to supplement SDK is SE-Flash.com. It checks how appealing your text for a search engine is after you have applied SDK.

SEO and Flash-animated websites
A good starting point for those who look for optimizing Flash is to begin separating such things from each other as the content of the web site and the way it is presented. It is very useful to use html for all the text information on your website adding images made in Flash as a superb final touch. Then, your site, which is in principal html-based, is ranked high by html-oriented search engines. Flash-based animation and interaction will present all this information in a remarkable way and will help you to increase rankings.

SEO and Flash-based websites
If you still prefer your site to be essentially Flash-based, then a good thing is to remove all the content from a Flash movie and include it into an html file. Then, using CSS (.div) and JavaScript (.swf) you can do the following:

<div id=”flashcontent”>

   If the user has the correct version of the Flash plugin
installed, this part will be replaced by the Flash content.
Just add your HTML content here and Google will index it just
as it would normal HTML content (because it is HTML content!)
Use HTML, embed images, anything you would normally place
on an HTML page is fine.

</div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

    // <![CDATA[

    var fo = new FlashObject(”flashmovie.swf”, “flashmovie”,
“300″, “300″, “8″, “#FF6600″);

    fo.write(”flashcontent”);

    // ]]>

</script>

Search engines that cannot cope with Flash, will skip it. Spiders of search engines will find robots.txt-file on your web site which will redirect them to a proper html file with the content you want to be indexed. However, beware that such redirecting can be regarded as spamming, so be very careful while applying this technique.

More useful tips
The use of noembed tags is considered to be one of the best ways of optimizing Flash-based websites. Placing the text information of the webpage between them is essential while securing a good search engine optimization strategy. Another good piece of advice is to make certain that Flash links lead to html pages, not to other Flash pages. Search engines seem to be improving their capability of indexing Flash content, but it is not perfect so far, so avoid abusing it yet.
Taking proper care of your website metadata should be perceived as a very important tool. Leaving metadata fields empty is indefensible, even though it is considered to be less important for search engines nowadays.

Smaller hints
Here are some smaller tricks which you can apply to optimize your Flash content. I strongly advise you to use symbols for every animated element that occurs more than one time and put these elements in groups (as long as it is possible). Restrict the number of fonts and font styles. Try to do it in such a way that a number of colors used in the web design fits into the palette peculiar to the browser.

Off-site optimization
Strengthen the linking from other renowned sites to yours. And the last (but not the least!!!!), be ready to depend on Pay Per Click advertising, since whatever the abilities of search engines to index Flash are, they are still far from being excellent.

This is what actually can be done to make the beauty and charm of Flash be noticed by search engines. As you can see nothing stands still, a lot is changing and more improvements, hopefully, will appear in the foreseeable future.

Tags: Flash, SEO

This entry was posted on Apr 30 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Flash, Useful Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.