As a site-building technology, Flash is hot because it offers visitors the smart and beautiful content presentation and interactivity that everybody wants to see. The reverse of the coin is that the Flash code is still insuperable for search engine robots and they are not as good at getting your Flash website indexed as the pure HTML sites are.
The good news is in the past few years search engines have made a breakthrough in Flash indexation. Google can now read SWF files of all kinds, including buttons, menus, self-contained Flash websites with their content, and extract URLs embedded in Flash.
Adobe in its “SWF searchability FAQ” says they are “working not only with Google but Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. Google is using the optimized Adobe Flash Player technology now, so users will immediately see improved search results. As Google spiders index more SWF content, search results will continue to get better”.
MSN/Live/Bing has been developing its own format, Silverlight, to compete with Flash, so Microsoft is unlikely to develop the toolset to read Flash files.
While waiting for the news from the major search engines, you may have your Flash site indexed and ranked by all search engines.
- If you are trying to choose a site-building technology, the most popular strategy is to build an (X)HTML site that uses textual content along with other technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and Flash instead of including everything in a single Flash file.
- If your site is already built in pure Flash, and you just want to optimize the content, the problem is that you will have only one page anyway. The disadvantage of such sites is that there isn’t a page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. As a solution, you can create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash “page” and install the Flash movie on each HTML page.
- Google can’t discover and index textual content written on images, so don’t put any there. Instead, add your texts directly into the Flash file. This way Google will discover and index it.
- Get more inbound links to your site. This will raise your ranking in major search engines. Pay attention to the keywords used in link text, they should correlate with your site keyword profile, mainly TITLE and META tags (these tags are vital for Flash sites) of the pages that the links point to.
- Give your visitors a choice between viewing an HTML or Flash version as soon as they enter the home page. Add a sample Flash movie with a short message:
