Flash Website Optimizing Methods

This article contains excerpts from Search Engine Optimization for Flash, which dispels the myth that SWF-based websites won't show up in a web search by demonstrating exactly what you can do to make your site fully searchable. You'll learn best practices for using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-as well as SWF Object-for building sites with SWF content that will stand tall in search rankings.

Flash SEO Myths

Although they may be legitimate, most of the reasons people don't like Flash are based on outdated myths regarding the technology's SEO capabilities. In this section, we'll look at some of the most prominent myths that create haters out of otherwise normal human folk.

Myth 1: Flash Content Is Bad for SEO

The first myth is that Flash and SEO don't mix. In other words, some people believe that to have an SEO site, you must eliminate most, if not all, Flash content. This is simply not true. Flash content, when used effectively, can work great with SEO. Other media elements, such as images, audio, and video (including video in Flash Player), are searchable based on the HTML content that surrounds them.

Myth 2: Flash Content Isn't Searchable

Another myth about Flash content is that search engines can't search through it to index the information within SWF files. For a long time, this myth was true. Though static text and links in SWF files could be indexed, this was only because Flash added that information to the HTML containing the SWF upon publishing.

Optimization Methods:

1.Creating optimized content in Flash

Now that you have some experience creating optimized HTML content, take a look at some techniques to make your SWF content more visible to search engines. This chapter discusses SEO mainly from the Flash development perspective, focusing on what you need to do for optimization when creating SWF applications.

2. SEO Flash programming

SEO Flash programming method implies the use of the primary content, DIV with search-engine-accessible and the JavaScript swf object function to find out whether the browser can view flash. Flash content is considered to be heavy on its interactive elements that are why search engine spiders pick up the primary content which implies text, links, headings etc. In case you have the appropriate Flash player version installed the JavaScript will manipulate the DOM (document object model) in order to replace the primary content with flash movies. Moreover, search engines are able to read text and links of the flash files according to the innovative algorithm announced by Google and Adobe in 2008 which enables flash textual content indexing. Thus you will present your interactive visual data successfully not damaging search engines which are dependent on the textual content.

3. Creating HTML pages

If your website is constructed only with Flash it may possess poor organization of content, unique page titles and internal links. In this case you can create separate HTML pages with Flash player installed on them to represent your every flash page so the visitors will see your website flash content and the search engines will be able to spider your web pages.

4. Flash SEO Original Methods

Flash has had built-in tools for SEO ever since Flash MX 2004 was released. Over the years, these features have received some improvements, but they aren't complete SEO powerhouses yet. In this section, we'll talk about each method, and their advantages and disadvantages.

5. Input metadata

This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

6. Sitemaps

Sometimes your web pages can get lost in the mix because there aren't many links to them, because they're new pages, or because of the content contained within the pages (i.e., dynamic content, SWF content, Ajax, or other media). Search engines can find out about these pages through a sitemap, a file containing information about pages on your site that you want search engines to index. Sitemap files can be in XML or plain-text format, and they require a special syntax to work properly.