The debate about the use of Flash has been going on for some time now. Many of the experts agree that flash is NOT search engine friendly. The reason for this is that Flash is mostly images and even the ‘text’ is only images of text . What that means is that the search engines cannot read it!

The Flash enthusiasts seem to be unconcerned by this, and often seem to be oblivious to SEO completely as long as it LOOKS good. According to a post on SEObook.com, apparantly there are ways to make flash more search engine friendly, these include:

• Making the page titles useful and highly descriptive as well as using meta descriptions.
  
• Embed the flash into HTML pages and utilise normal text links where possible
  
• Add HTML text to the page if possible to do without mucking up the layout
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using noembed tags.
• Instead of including everything in one flash file it may make sense to break the content into different flash files so you can create different HTML pages around the different ideas contained in it.
• Macromedia has a search engine SDK, although I think most sites are still best off using texual representations of the flash files on the HTML content of pages
• Mike Knott also recommended this JavaScript plugin for flash detection. It is XHTML compliant, and, so long as you use it properly, it is better than the Noembed tag.

***source – www.seobook.com

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!