Flash - Making Friends With SEO!
Published On :22 July,2010
The concept of Flash not being SEO-friendly has long loomed in the corridors of uncertainty but now it is time to change. With the ever-evolving technologies and improving search engine algorithms, search engine crawlers have come about to index Flash efficiently and feature them in the search results.
All you need to do is feed them with some accessible Flash content and you are ready to go. This way you can create highly creative website designs as well as be assured that you'd get good amounts of traffic from the search engines. Here are some effective Flash optimization tips:
Add SWF content to HTML
Extract the contents of SWF and place it in your HTML sources. This helps the search engine crawlers to pick up the web page and index it within its database. You can use tools like Dreamweaver to embed the Flash contents using SWF objects.
Create a Unique URL
It is extremely important to have a unique URL for all the web pages of your site if you want your Flash contents to get indexed. All the pages should have their own HTML source title 'H1' and the content body should be rich with relevant keywords and phrases of the website.
Use Source Content Dumping
You cannot optimize a single page HTML rich RIA just by adding the content into the HTML source of the page for each section of the Flash application. This is because there would be many competing keywords and there would be absolutely no advantage to the content. Therefore, always keep extracted Flash content relevant to the web page it is on.
Monitor fresh Initiatives
Adobe has collaborated with search engine giants Google and Yahoo to make SWF files more search engine friendly. This enables search engine crawlers to parse through the contents of the SWF files on the internet and index them in the search results. This would highly enhance the search engine friendliness of Flash.
Add Text to Flash Applications
Instead of using flattened bitmaps, use Flash generated text in the Flash elements. And make sure to include your relevant keywords and phrases in the Flash text so that it helps attract traffic to the website. Make sure the text is used in the HTML source of the web pages as well.
Avoid Pop-Ups
Pop-ups are generally categorized as advertisements and is blocked in majority of computer systems. Moreover, websites generally ask for user permission before they launch Flash content into a new window. This makes it increasingly difficult for the search engine crawlers to index the text contained in them.
Use the Robot.txt File
The robot.txt file is a plain text file that is located at the root of your server. This informs the search engine crawlers about what contents need to be crawled and what doesn't. If you have the same content on the Flash text as well as its HTML version, use the robot.txt file to ignore the SWF content (Flash content) and focus on the HTML contents only.
Maneet Puri leads LeXolution IT Services, a top notch web development company that provides powerful web solutions and KPO services to its clients from across the world. The web development services provided by LIT are a class apart.
