Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines - Link Building, PPC, and Site Structure

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Increase your Link Building Strategy
There is more to SEO than just your content. 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. Of course, every SEO should concentrate on this area, but it’s even more important for the Flash site. Use anchor text properly (i.e. “Best SEO Tip” versus “Click here”), link to relevant and complimenting sites, and achieve those precious one way links.

If it is indeed harder for a search engine to find your Flash site, then make it accessible to them by back links. This will also help your traffic when you are not being indexed the way you like in the search engines, especially for those search engines that do not incorporate the SDK technology like MSN.

Prepare to use Pay Per Click Heavily
Web developers must factor in the cost of Pay Per Click (PPC) when building a Flash site. 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. In fact, one AltaVista engineer reported that it wasn’t a priority, and had no intentions on including reading Flash into their search engine. Be aware, also, that Google’s AdSense officiallydoes not read .swf files. So in this sense, you may rely more heavily upon PPC than if you used a full HTML site.

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. While this sparks a bit of controversy in the ideology of this method, it appears that established sites that already index well who add Flash to their sites at a later date do not seem to suffer the same effects of a new site done in Flash. It would be a good topic of discussion in the SEO Chat forums.

Better yet, create a low-res HTML version of your Flash site, and let the users choose their preference. That way, you have the best of both worlds: a Flash site for the visitors wanting the glamour, and an HTML site for the search engine spiders and for those visitors on dial up.

Next: CSS Layers and More SEO Flash Tips >>
 

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