SEO Updates

Found through BlogSEO, here’s a good article about how to optimize your Flash site for search engines. By essence, Flash is all about images and animations, and not about these text links that Google and others so much rely on.

Here are the points it develops. They’re of course more detailed in the article itself:

• Use Flash movies on your HTML pages—do not create your site entirely in Flash. A better way to incorporate Flash, if indeed your client must have it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners.
• Use Splash Pages Sparingly and Appropriately. Also provide visitors with means to skip the intro, else you may just lose them. (I myself really dislike such intro movies imposed on me: I need t ohave the option to skip them!)
• The Macromedia Software Developer Kit (SDK). Macromedia’s Search Engine SDK includes an application that is called swf2html, which extracts links and text from a flash movie, then returns the data into an HTML file.
• Increase your Link Building Strategy. If you must give up some of your crucial text in favor of the slick Flash content, then it is even more important for you to concentrate on your linking strategies.
• Prepare to use Pay Per Click Heavily. A budget for this type of advertising must be included in the cost of developing the site, as it seems that the search engines may be getting better at reading Flash, they still don’t index Flash sites quickly, if at all.
• Build an HTML site, and incorporate Flash later. Some web developers choose to develop a website in HTML first, then once they’ve established search engine positioning and PageRank, add Flash later on.
• Use CSS layers. A method I have seen used is creating invisible layers in CSS, which can place invisible text over the Flash text, readable by search engines, yet not appearing to the human eye. I will caution strongly against this method, as I believe it is very similar to cloaking. However, the controversy arises because while cloaking is presenting one set of text information to visitors, then another to search engines, the search engines can detect this type of practice as spam, and the likelihood of banning exists.

A list of additional tips is also given at the end of the article.

Yzabel wrote this on September 4th, 2005 and filed it under SEO Tips |