Flash & SEO - SEO Tips
There is much confusion from Flash designers and other deisgners if there content can be indexed by search engines and if they have a chance of ranking in the search engines. Recently at the WebmasterWorld Conference in Las Vegas Tim Mayer from Yahoo held a seminar talking about good site structure for rankings in Yahoo, in the power point presentation he touched upon Flash content and a few things that can be done to make the content indexable (and also worth while). Thanks to Ysearchblog for putting his power point show online.
Firstly we have a few facts from Yahoo. Yahoo! does not currently crack open flash files to follow links or extract textual elements. Macromedia provided the SDK but extracting text from .swf files provided little value due to the small amount of text within flash files and much of this text was not useful (“skip intro”). Content providers did not optimize their flash content for search engines. Below are a few tips for optimising a page with Flash.
- Make sure relevant content is text in the .swf files
- Create plenty of descriptive text & meta info for the header of the page
- Put user prompts such as “skip intro” as graphical content
- Create both a “flash” and “html” site versions
- href links in html as a footer on each page
- Make sure that the title tags are keyword rich sentences and specific for all pages