How to Build a SEO Flash Website

Search engines index Flash websites.

Webmasters use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve the volume of traffic to a website via search results. Flash has many key benefits such as quick download speeds, advanced interactivity, the ability to include video and animation and scale objects. In spite of these advantages, building an SEO Flash website has been problematic for web designers and developers in the past because search engines could not access the information within the site. This would cause a website to receive a poor search visibility rating. Today, Flash sites can rank well in search engines if designers use a few SEO techniques.

Instructions

1. Create and submit a detailed sitemap of your pages. A sitemap is an XML file that provides a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. Sitemaps enable webmasters to submit all URLs to the Google index and to inform search engines about pages that are available for crawling.

2. Provide descriptive page titles and metadata tags to help web indexing robots assign your website a ranking in their database. Metadata tags should include keywords and descriptions. Many search engines will not visit your website if there are no metadata tags.

3. Use SWFObject to improve the search engine capability of a Flash website. SWFObject is a Javascript library that lets Webmasters place HTML code behind Flash. It detects the browser's Flash player version and will allow alternative text and links to be indexed in case search engine crawlers do not support Flash.

4. Promote your SEO Flash website by using a technique called Deep Linking, which makes a hyperlink that points to a page or image on a website. Search engines have weighted link analysis heavily in ranking a page. Deep Linking helps your visitors find their desired pages faster by linking content that is buried within a site.

Tips & Warnings

• Download SWFObject code and find documentation for free at: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject. SWFObject can improve search engine results in Flash websites.

• Embed Flash files into HTML pages. Building a site entirely in Flash is not the best practice since Google's and other search engine's ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving.

• Provide links to website pages to improve the chances of search engines crawling more of the Flash site.

References

• Adobe: Search Engine Optimization for Flash
• Swfobject
• Adobe: Deep-linking to Frames in Flash Websites

Resources

• Sitemaps - Search Engine Optimization for Flash
• Active Tuts: Building SEO Friendly Flash Sites
• CNET News: Google Reads Flash Text, So Optimize It
• SEO.com: Merging Flash With SEO