Web designers and SEO experts are divided because of Flash. SEO experts often see Flash as a nightmare because of its technology that usually includes picture and sounds. You see, search engines can’t easily index the Flash file’s contents. You need to feed the search engines with the Flash movie’s text; otherwise, the text will be lost and it will not help in boosting your site’s rankings.
Why is it that Flash sites are disliked by search engines? The artistic qualities of Flash sites are not the main reason why search engines do not like them. Spiders find it hard to understand Flash movies – it’s as simple as that. It can’t index Flash movies unlike plain text pages. Filenames can be indexed by spiders but not its contents.
Binary formats (.swf) are used by Flash files and the spiders can’t read them without any assistance. At times, the Flash contents are also not indexed even with some form of assistance.
Even if spiders don’t like Flash movies, there are times when it is also needed. Generally, SEO experts should limit Flash movies for these reasons - many users tend to skip ads, banners, and even Flash movies because they are distracted and flash movies consume lots of bandwidth.
Stories can be enhanced with the use of Flash but it is not good at telling. If you’re an SEO, you should not use Flash for the whole site because you can never achieve high rankings. Aside from that, you need to be aware that Flash should not be used for navigation because site navigation should be built using text links only.
There are some approaches that you can use in optimizing flash sites such as:
1. Input metadata – this approach is often misunderstood and underestimated. Make sure that you put something on the metadata fields.
2. Providing alternative pages – users should never be forced to watch Flash movies and so you need to provide HTML pages. This may require a bit of work but your efforts will surely pay off since users will love it as well as search engines.
3. Flash Search Engine SDK – a highly advanced tool that can be used to extract Flash movie text. You can use the swf2html tool. As the word suggests, this tool extracts links and texts from Flash files and converts it to HTML docs. The contents should be checked and if you find any mistakes, try to make the necessary corrections. There are times when the font’s color and that of the background is the same; this is an issue since you would run into the hidden text territory.
4. SE-Flash.com – by using this tool, you can determine the Flash files that are noticeable to search engines. You can use it together with the Flash Search Engine SDK to ensure accuracy of all the extracted texts.
Make use of these approaches so that you can start optimizing your Flash sites. You can find other approaches but just make sure that you stick with the ethical SEO practices.
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