Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines
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It’s my second most hated site to optimize: Flash. For an SEO, Flash websites list right up there with Javascript sites, which is my first nemesis. More and more of my clients are having their sites done in flash, then handing me the site, and saying, “Now, turn water into wine, please; and make it a Chardonnay…” So instead of moaning, complaining, wheedling and whining, I’ve found other things to do instead.
The first time I optimized a Flash site, it was a disaster. But since then, I’ve learned some very effective ways to optimize a Flash site. What seemed miraculous in the beginning isn’t as daunting a task as it needs to be. While I still hate to optimize flash, and I question the wisdom of doing so, there is no getting around it these days.
Flash does provide a great user experience, and can definitely increase sales. After all, people are very visually stimulated, and it is often the flashy sites that attract the customer to actually buy the product. If it looks great, then it must be great, right? I admit, I counsel against using Flash sites because they are so difficult to optimize, and frankly, make my job harder. But even I love to watch movies, and Flash is very impressive. People like interactivity, and Flash does provide them a method to get potential customers involved in a site.
As an SEO, you understand the importance of search engine rankings, and the best methods on achieving positioning. But to your client, what they really want are sales, and for visitors to buy their product and turn into customers. They want all that and more. So even if they understand the importance of what you are trying to convey to them, they still want the pretty site, because perception is everything. They know they may have the best product in the world, but if the package is ugly, people are less likely to buy. And they believe this about their website also. So it’s your job to make them happy, and ultimately, bring them the sales. They want the pretty site, packaged in the glossy box, and they want it optimized in the same breath. You can try to convince them of your view, but in the end, they want their cake and eat it too.
So how do you accomplish all that? Here are a few ways to increase user experience without sacrificing ranking.
Use Flash movies, not sites
Crawler based search engines still prefer html versus images, flash, and other scripts. But if you embed your glitzy flash movies into your content-rich HTML, you will still get the benefits of optimization. While search engines like Google, AtomzSearch, HotBot, and FAST engines (AlltheWeb, InfoSpace, and Lycos) are getting better at extracting links from flash sites, it is still very difficult for them, and other third party search engines have made no mention of extracting useful information from Flash. Yahoo claims they can read .swf files, but so far I’ve not seen any evidence that they read enough content to usefully rank a Flash site in its index.
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. These areas are usually of little importance to a search engine anyway, so it seems fine to do it this way. In which case, optimizing this type of site is no different than optimizing a plain ole HTML site. This is my top recommendation for Flash.
Just as you would caution against using images for your important text, keywords, and other important aspects of your site, the same reasoning applies to Flash in these cases. If you are using several competitive keywords, then you will be well advised to split your pages up by topic, instead of using one web page, and then using multiple Flash movies for each page.
Next: Splash Pages and the Flash SDK for Search Engines >>
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