Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines - Splash Pages and the Flash SDK for Search Engines
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Use Splash Pages Sparingly and Appropriately
Everyone seems to love a great Flash intro. But even to a charmed visitor, multiple splash pages with no way out get tiresome. You should give your visitors the option to advance past the intro on their own, without the nasty redirect, which a lot of Flash intros use to send the visitor to the actual content of the site. We know the search engine spiders do not like redirects. So let your visitor take control over their experience.
On the flip side, you should have more than a single entry point into your site. No, I’m not talking about creating a bunch of doorway pages and redirecting them to your Flash site. I’m talking about optimizing each page of your site according to its content.
Don’t have one splash page as your entry point, and then compile all of the movies into that single page. This forces the visitor to have to return to the beginning just to get to another place in your site. If you need an “About Us” page, then create a separate page, and optimize it. Create another “Articles” page, optimize it, and so on. But please, don’t create a splash page for each. Even your visitors won’t like that very much.
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. Users of this SDK can add functionality by adding Flash file decompression, parsing, and indexing features to their server-based search applications. While Macromedia is working with a number of third-party search engines in this regard, they haven’t announced any specific search engine support.
The Macromedia Search Engine SDK is designed for search engine application teams. What this means to you, the SEO, is an insider’s view to what the search engines actually see. Do your homework: simply to know which search engines utilize the SDK, and optimize the site for those specific search engines.
You can obtain a license for the Search Engine SDK, and extract the text from a flash site itself, so that you know exactly what these types of search engines will see. Usually, the first line of text extracted is perceived as the title, so it is extremely valuable for you to know how to place the text in the flash file. Will this require you to become an expert Flash programmer? No, as long as you are able to convey what you want effectively to the Flash developer.
Be familiar with the filetype operator in Google (filetype:swf typed after a search term). Try any search in Google with this operator. This will demonstrate that this content is extracted from the Flash itself. But just how deep does this extraction go? No one is certain, but with the SDK, you can get a pretty good idea. We do know that all the text from top to bottom is read, which is tested this way: choose an exact search term that’s near the end of your movie, the run your swf2html application. You will see your search term show up in your HTML output file.
You can find more information about Macromedia’s Search Engine SDK at: http://www.macromedia.com/licensing/developer/search/faq/
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