Flash enabled sites can have stunning look, but it
may not help to achieve the top position in the search engine. Flash movies
have their own links and pages, which the search engine spiders
are not able to crawl. The spider identifies only a single page
that contains the movies and indexes the content of that single
page. This reduces the internal link building in the site i.e. the
movie being linked to another scene within itself.
Possibilities for optimising a Flash site:
Ensure the proper optimisation
of the page that contains the Flash movie. Non flash version of your website can be kept along
your Flash version.
Most users maintain a special ‘plugin’
installed to view flash movies. When the flash movies are
large, and you do not have a broadband, then the downloading
time is really huge. An alternative like the HTML version
can be used, which supports search engine optimisation and
also helps the visitors to have a clear view of your site
who have technology limitations.
You could overcome these problems
in Flash Pages with the help of the some special Search Engine Optimisation
Techniques.
Flash Web Site Vs. HTML Web Site:
A website can have two versions: Flash Version
and the Non Flash Version (HTML version). Home page can have the
links for these versions and the visitors can select the version
of their preference. Make sure that the home page is not a splash
page. Endure that your home page has keyword rich content to have
it indexed by the search engine. A site map link can also be added
in order to help the search engine to crawl through all the pages.
Making use of the web analytics software
to keep in track of the visitor preferences, you can decide upon
which version to have in your website. But remember to submit only
the HTML version to the search engine.
Some Search Engines Index Flash Content:
Flash can be either preferred or rejected. But
things have changed now. Flash has gained importance with the help
of the latest Macromedia products and the search engine technologies.
It is possible to have flash in your website without affecting your
search engine promotion.
SDK May Open All Flash To Search Engines:
Macromedia’s Flash Search Engine SDK is
a boon for the Flash. Being designed specifically focussing on the
search engine application teams; it decompresses the flash files,
parse the content and also assists in indexing of these into the
search engine database.
The content is treated as a normal HTML content.
SDK technology helps in promoting all Flash sites also to the search
engines just like you promote the static HTML pages. FAST search
engine has already incorporated this SDK technology. Even though
all the search engines incorporate this technology, promoting the
Flash still becomes a problem as the search engines uses the same
algorithm for indexing the HTML version and Flash version. Normally
the developers do not expect the flash version to be indexed, so
not much care is given in optimising these flash files for the targeted
keywords and other elements.
With the experience of optimising HTML versions,
it is easy to create flash that has the similar principles. Once
this is done, with the help of flash-friendly search engines, optimising
these flash files becomes an easy task.
Flash Web Sites - Optimize through link building:
For a search engine the flash appears to be as
a single page i.e. just the home page. To have the flash in the
search engine results, a proper link building strategy can give
wonderful results.
Flash Web Site With Multiple Web Pages:
Optimising a flash site with a few non-competitive
keywords seems to be an easy task. But the process gets on very
tedious when the flash movie seems to be large.
A flash site may seem to have multiple pages,
while they may not. Most of the flash site consists of a single
page with a single movie. And many site seem to have a number of
entry points, while generally flash site has only one entry point.
Generally used optimisation strategies can
be used for optimising the flash site. Making use of the right content
and titles for optimising the flash sites can have good results.
When you do not have content for your pages, then it is essential
to make use of the appropriate Meta tags. If the flash site has
a huge set of targeted keywords, splitting it into separate pages
would minimise your optimisation efforts and is also preferred.
Flash-friendly Search Engines:
Fast Technologies, which powers AllTheWeb and
Lycos had a lot of new additions to their search technology in the
year 2002. They announced the ability to access the content in the
Flash files.
The result, even though not perfect, but has been successful to
index a lot of text thus making it searchable. Search engine Power
Pack’s submission tool can be used to submit one or more pages
to both AllTheWeb and Lycos Search Engines.
As we know that the google’s ranking
is based on the site's link popularity score, page content, and
structural elements. Google is able to follow the links within the
flash sites. When the flash page leads to another page, the spider
would not much of content to be used for indexing. It would infact
benefit both the web designers and the searchers if the search engines
are able to index the flash page content. It also makes the ranking
of the pages easy.
Tips: If you really need Flash in your site make them as Flash movies and intros, not Flash sites. You can make the same strong visual impact with a site
built in HTML, with Flash movies placed inside of the HTML documents.
Ensure the proper optimisation
of the page that contains the Flash movie.