Flash, now SEO Friendly?
Search engine optimizers and web designers have been aiming to do their projects in the flash format (.swf) since it easily attracts their visitor by visual presentation. However, it cannot attract search engines that well – but here are some tips to improve the presence of you website, stating them as follows:
Embed SWF into HTML Codes: An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.
Uniqueness is an advantage: As we always say, keep your content unique. However, if your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1″ and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.
Content Dumping: A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.
Keep those eyes open: Adobe Inc. has been working out things with two of the largest search engines around the globe, Google and Yahoo! However, since it’s still under development, it is still not a reliable way to conduct your projects in such formats.
Text over Images: Yeah, it’s true that pictures can speak a thousand word. But adding some text onto your project wouldn’t hurt, it’s still the best way to drive traffic. Likewise, don’t forget to put those keywords onto your HTML source code.’
Pop-Ups? I hate it! You all know that search engines hate it! Browsers hate it too… As well as I hate it too… Meaning, the less chance the content would be read by a spider, renderer and a user.
Robots.txt – Your friendly robot: I assume that you already know what “robots.txt” are. This tells a search engine’s bot to which content they’re allowed and disallowed to crawl nor index.
Embed Flash with SWF: SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.
Parang ayoko pa din ng flash website hehe. Because there are still things that I can’t do on Flash like right clicking on links and open in a new tab/window, checking nofollow links, etc.