Flash SEO – Flash Search Engine Optimization Tips
So I had a friend who had an entire flash only site and it looked amazing but it was all flash. An SEO person like myself dreads this. Here was my solution for an entire flash site and making it SEO friendly. Hopefully this helps someone out if they have a client or their own site is entirely flash and they want to get better SEO results. If I had an entire Flash / SWF file I would chop it up into smaller elements and mix in HTML for the sake of user experience and for indexation in search engines.
I would make the smaller elements easy to fit into an HTML layout. This would be an easy fix to make the site load okay if someone doesn’t have flash installed/has a slow computer for the sake of user experience. Ideally there should be a script that detects if flash is present and if not it would show an HTML/Javascript version (http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/detection.htm). JQuery is a fantastic Javascript library that can mimic many of the fancy flash elements as well and should be checked out. However this is my hard SEO/User Experience perspective and if you just want to know how to index your flash for SEO purposes see below.
To make content/flash indexation possible by Google for SEO purposes you need to do the following:
- Use external XML or text files. XML offers search engines a structured and semantic format for indexing site content. And it makes it easier to implement multi-language versions of an application. By keeping your content layer separate from your presentation layer you’ll have a better overall application.
- Create Unique URLs for Important Sections. “Creating unique URLs for important sections of your SWF file, based on the keywords for which you want to optimize, will help search engines navigate into your SWF application and provide targeted results for the most relevant content,” wrote SEO expert Damien Bianchi, in a March 2009 article. To create these unique links, you may want to employ SWFAddress or UrlKit.
- Use the HTML noscript Tag. It can be a good idea to put important site or application content in side of HTML noscript tags, which effectively puts your content into a search engine spider’s favorite language. If you are using external XML, files, you can even load the content dynamically on the server-side.
- Use XSL When Feasible. XSL can define XML formatting and presentation, so you can use it to single XML source to control both Flash content and HTML content, like navigation. You’ll make the entire site’s content searchable and you will be using an effective site development strategy.
Source:
http://www.getelastic.com/seo-for-flash/
Other resources for Flash indexation and Flash SEO:
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml
http://www.flashnseo.com/
http://www.reelseo.com/swfobject-video-seo-2/
http://www.webzo.org/tutorials/seo/flash-optimization.php
