Search Engine Optimization when you use Flash

Google is able to index Flash pages...somewhat. But some special thought needs to go into getting search engines to understand what any flash content is about. Gravity Search Marketing have a good site "Your SEO Plan" . It has a lot of useful stuff, including advice about Flash. Here's an excerpt :

"Flash Best Practices for SEO

To help search engines see and properly list your website contents in their search results, we recommended the following best practices for Flash SEO:

• Use Flash only when necessary, and consider wrapping decorative flash elements in HTML navigation if possible. Pages should degrade gracefully for users who do not have javascript or Flash.
• Build separate HTML landing pages (with distinct URLs) for your separate Flash landing "pages." Each separate HTML page should deep link to the appropriate part of your Flash movie.
• Embed your Flash using SWFobject so that you can display alternate HTML content. Make sure that the text content in the alternate HTML is as identical as possible to the Flash content. Graphic elements can be described, just as you would describe a photo with a caption or an image ALT tag.
• If you generate your Flash content from an external XML file, use the same XML file to generate the alternate HTML content.

Essentially, for an all-Flash site, you should create "shadow" HTML pages, which display deep-linked Flash for humans, and mimic the Flash experience and content for search engines. These pages can serve as entry points from search engines."

[from Does Google Index Flash?]

Comments

[Seo Company]

Great post and by the way Great title as well. That is what got me to read the rest of the post. Thanks and hope you write more.