Adobe Flash Search Engine Optimisation

When it comes to flash, its not the most search engine friendly thing. So if you must use flash here are some surefire tips to get you ranking.

1. Make sure that the text that is in your movie(swf) is actual text and not broken apart into shapes. Googlebot can see flash files but can’t make any sense of whats in the flash. currently flash does not rank well based on only the swf. However that said it still indexes that text.

2. Use Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) to embed your flash into a site. This basically has a swap and replace when either flash player is not installed or Javascript is turned off. Once you have embedded your flash. The replaced content in <div> tag should be edited but thats in the next step.

3. Make a html version of the website taking care to make it usable and good looking. This will replace the flash movie when the user does not have flash. Thus making a flash and a html site in one domain.

Make sure you put each page on a new html file. so that each page may rank for a keyword. Create a different SWF for each page but make sure that they link up. to create a normal site. How you do this is entirely up to you.

IMPORTANT!!! Do not keyword spam the html version of your webpage. make it normal and assume users will use it. You may use normal seo techniques to seo this html site.

4. Create Keyword Rich title tag making sure that it is 65 characters long(including spaces). Google only see’s 65 characters in the title. it clips the rest of the title.

eg. the title for this article is “Flash Search Engine Optimisation / Flash SEO and Flash UFO” <– 58 characters which is good.

5. Write a description that will hook a reader in the google search engine results page. 155 Characters is the max amount of characters for this. Ask them a question or advertise the price of your product. Google does not use this to rank your site. But other Search Engines do. So keep the Keywords. Once you have done this your result will lay nicely in Google. I have also seen a trend of these ‘correctly formatted results’ ranking higher.

6. Wait for it to index and see the results. This is where you need to tweak your site so that it will rank better.

you now can have a Flash Website that ranks well. Flash is back and its better than ever.