How to optimize a flash site for search engines
Most of us are aware of the prowess and beauty that animations of Macromedia Flash bring to the fore. From better site navigation to pure bedazzlement, flash animations can make one’s SEO website nothing short of impressive. But as easy as it is to the eyes, flash based SEO websites can also get conveniently ignored by search engines with the same ease. Over-reliance on such flash animation can beautify a site well, but also lead to its downfall. Expanding our horizons from merely search engine optimization, flash banners and movies by and large tend to distract users and they avoid it. SEO Flash animations and movies are tremendously weighty and require a lot of bandwidth to efficiently load; a novelty not every internet surfer may possess with his/her internet connection. Some reasons and remedies are discussed systematically below: -
SEO supporting flash animations contain more graphics and less SEO content. Search engines had been formerly made to encounter website scripting in HTML format. Because flash animations do not incorporate text in HTML format, it gets conveniently ignored. It’s important that there must be SEO centric text placed appropriately and in considerable amounts somewhere on the non-flash parts of the site (including in its internal HTML scripting) to ensure that the search engine is able to notice keywords on the site. Flash can merely enhance the message by beautifying it but not telling it.
A nice way to avoid the above is to build two websites simultaneously - one in HTML format and the other in flash. That way, search engines will at least be able to detect and index the HTML section of one’s SEO website.
When coding a website, flash movies are more apt rather than a flash website. SEO Flash movies in addition to its visual impact, if properly encoded and incorporated in HTML coding, can serve dual purpose of satisfying the searchers and the possibility of being detected in search engines.
There are certain standards available on the internet which allows searches within flash animation to be indexed. However, the problem is that it has not been universally adopted as a policy to incorporate such standards in most search engines just as yet.
Search engines in spite of not having the aforesaid standard still possess the power of detecting links within flash animations. Hence, incorporating powerful and useful links in flash animations can act as saving grace for one’s website for a glimmer of hope to be indexed in search engines and fulfill the SEO objective.
If all fails, using text extraction tools from flash animations is what must be employed. Saving the droning monotony of creating separate HTML pages, tools like swf2html extracts links and text from flash animations and converts them into HTML format documents. This however, still needs monitoring for errors that may creep into the scripting, but its well worth considering the standard HTML page is already done for the webmaster, to manage his SEO website successfully.
