How to Optimize Flash Wesites

Including sounds and picture on a Web site is indeed a good idea to make the site colorful and appealing. But Flash movies are disliked by SEO experts for the simple reason that search engines cannot easily index the contents inside a Flash file. Unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, this text for all practical purposes is lost for boosting site rankings.

Why Search Engines Hate Flash

It is quite often asked why Search engines resent Flash Web sites – the answer Flash movies are too complicated for a spider to comprehend. Spiders are not capable of indexing a Flash movie directly as they would with a plain page of text. Spiders index only filenames but without the inside contents.

People who are more technology-oriented know that Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file. There is no denying that there are differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but as regards Flash, all search engines uniformly detest it.

Web content has evolved from plain old text to more seemingly attractive content including video, sound and Flash as most web developers feel that this type of engaging content is likely to create a bigger impact on visitors. After all, most people are psychologically stimulated seeing Flash and it is often the flashy sites that attract the customer to actually buy the product. It is also a fact that people are fond of interaction, and Flash does provide them that opportunity. Flash admittedly provide a great user experience, and can positively help win over customers.

The problem is that most search engines cannot index Flash files and all they see when they visit a Flash page is the Title and META tags. Since Flash sites traditionally hold no content other than the Flash file, this endangers the ranking of the entire site.

Flash movies are best avoided or at least kept to the minimum. Apart from the fact that Flash is not spider favorite they also consume a lot of bandwidth. It is also a fact that Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they may miss the main message. One does come across sites flooded with Flash and these developers must completely forget all about SEO rankings!

Marketing professionals will say that though they have the best product in the world, people are less likely to buy if the package is unattractive or clumsy. And this is how they view their website also. All organizations want an appealing site with lot of color and animation, and they want it search engine optimized as well. It is clear all of them want their cake and eat it too.

Some professionals may argue that there are workarounds but it must be said that until search engines start indexing Flash movies like plain text these workarounds are, most of the time, a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites. Notwithstanding the varied opinions about workarounds, let us study some of the more important methods:

• Input Metadata:

  Although metadata is now not as important to search engines as earlier, Flash development tools are capable of easily adding metadata to your movies. So it is advisable not to leave the metadata fields empty.

• Providing Alternative Pages:

  It will be a good idea to provide html only pages that makes it optional for the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these alternate pages may be tedious and time-consuming, but effort is worthwhile because even search engines will see the html only pages. A second HTML version also provides users on slow internet connections an opportunity to properly view your site. If you have no choice but to use Flash to deliver your presence, build a Flash version and an HTML version. If you only go with a Flash version you must build a site consisting of embedded flash content in optimized HTML pages.

• Flash Search Engine SDK:

  This is acknowledged as a very effective tool to extract text from a Flash movie. This tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output in the form of a standard HTML document, thus obviating the otherwise cumbersome task of doing it manually. It is highly recommended that designers and developers implement the Macromedia Search engine SDK into their portfolio. The Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK 1.0 provides search engines with the means to search and index Macromedia Flash (SWF) movies. More information on the Macromedia Search engine SDK is available at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/download/search_engine/index.html.

• SE-Flash.com

  is a useful tool as it transparently displays what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. Even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK,SE-Flash.com provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Further, this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will offer.

An effective way to incorporate Flash into a website, if your client insists for it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners. These areas are in any case of little importance to a search engine - so no damage is done. In which case, optimizing this type of site is no different than optimizing a plain HTML site.

Since crawler-based search engines were basically designed to index HTML text, web sites built with Flash became difficult or at times even impossible for crawlers to read. However, FAST Search, which is the search engine powering AlltheWeb.com and Lycos, recently claimed that it can index, sites using Flash. It is reported that FAST is the first web search engine to support the Flash file format using the Macromedia SDK. This will make Flash sites visible to the end user via a search engine. This enhancement will make both the text and the links within the Flash file visible to the FAST crawler.

Google is another search engine that can, at least partially, index Flash sites. It is believed that Google has the ability to extract links from Flash files. Google claims that they were able to extract more than 50% links from Flash files than by using the standard Macromedia developer's kit that some other search engines use.

It is strongly recommended that you run a spider simulation on your Flash site as this simulator will indicate if anything is going wrong on your site as also what the search engines spiders will see.

Creating Flash Sites with Adobe Flash

Flash is “a set of multimedia technologies” created by Adobe for adding animations and interactivity to Web pages. Flash can be used in creating small components for websites (e.g., animated advertisement), and creating entire web sites.

When a web site is created using adobe flash, the web pages are designed as graphics by using Adobe Flash Tools. The page template is generally designed as graphic. The navigation menu is designed such that when selecting a menu item the consequent Web content is loaded into the page template. This is done using Flash ActionScript coding. The final website in this case is a movie that is compiled by flash as a .swf file. To display the movie in the browser, it is necessary that it should be included into an HTML file as an OBJECT using a SCRIPT tag. As a result the entire “Web site” is embedded into this object, screen readers will not be able to “see” the content, and search engines will not be able to index the site.

The NOSCRIPT Element “to the Rescue”

The NOSCRIPT element can be used for designing Web pages for “user agents that don’t support scripting” and and to hide script data from these user agents.

The NOSCRIPT element can be used to create all the essential HTML elements (and even CSS elements) to create an HTML version of the Flash Web site that is accessible to search engines and screen readers. Furthermore, this content can be optimized for search using common SEO techniques. The SCRIPT and NOSCRIPT elements would co-exist in the same HTML file so that the SCRIPT element displays the Flash site for users with scripting enabled, and the NOSCRIPT element displays the HTML site for users with scripting disabled as well as screen readers and search engines.

This NOSCRIPT approach is similar to the approach of using the NOFRAME tag for optimizing sites designed using frames. Depending on the size and the complexity of the Flash site, this can be a simple or cumbersome solution. In either case, additional SEO work is essential for Flash sites and should be factored into the budget of the project from the initial phases.

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