Optimizing Flash Sites

If there is really a hot potato that divides SEO experts and web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology for sound and picture on a website, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is quite prosaic – search engines can not index (or at least not easily) the contents into a Flash file and if you are feeding them with the text in a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course there are workarounds, but search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were ordinary text, these solutions are only a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, but they are better than nothing.
Why search engines dislike Flash sites?

Search engines dislike Flash Web sites because of their artistic qualities (or lack thereof) but because Flash movies are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders can not index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a simple page of text. Spiders index file names (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (. Swf) and spiders can not read the inside of a Flash file, at least not without help. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will crawl and index all your Flash content. And this applies to all search engines. There may be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it, but they index parts.
What (not) to use Flash?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not his favorites spider, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies on a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason.First Flash movies, including banners and other forms of advertising, distract users and they generally tend to skip them.Secondly, Flash movies in bold. They consume much bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection, or better still not the norm.

Basically, designers stick to the saying that Flash is good for improving a story, but not for telling it – ie you have a text with the main points of the story (and the keywords you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie for further details or simply a visual representation of the story, adding. In this context, the biggest SEO sin to the whole site in Flash! This is simply inexcusable and not even dream of a high ranking!

Another “No” to Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the home page, where once it was fashionable to splash a stunning Flash movie, but also external links. Although it is a more common error to images and / or javascript for navigation, Flash banners and movies should not be used to allow users from one page to another cause. SEO Text links are the only approved way to build site navigation.
Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

Although an interim solution is no solution, Flash sites can still be optimized. There are several ways to do this:

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Input metadata
This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important as it used for search engines, Flash development tools easy to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields blank.
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Alternative pages
For a good site is a must to only html pages not force the user to provide the Flash movie to watch. The preparation of these pages requires more work, but the reward is worth it, because not only users, but search engines and see the only HTML pages.
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Flash Search Engine SDK
This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie here. One of the most useful applications in Flash Search Engine SDK tool called the swf2html. As the name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output to a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious task to do it manually.
However, you should still look at the extracted contents and correcting, if necessary. For example the order in which the text is arranged and left perhaps a little restructuring is necessary to the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or the top of the page.
Also, you need to make sure no duplicate content in the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The color of the font of the text is also playing a different problem. If the color of the font of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will be hidden text territory.

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SE-Flash.com
Here is a visual tool that shows what your Flash file is visible to search engines and what not. This tool is useful, even if you have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it is a verification of the correctness of the extracted text. Nor is it certain that Google and other search engines Search Engine SDK for Flash content to get a Flash file, so that this tool could give very different results from those who will produce the SDK.

These approaches are just some of the prime examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well.However, not all of them are bright and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – for example the creation of invisible layers of text that comes to spinning instead of the Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – that is, no duplicate or fake content, is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to avoid.

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