SEO Tips & Tricks for flash websites
Usage of text in HTML
If you have only a very small amount of text in your Flash animation is to place that text in the <title> tag of the HTML page. Search engines weight page titles high.
Another solution is to put all the text “below the fold” so that although it is contained in the HTML page, the initial experience of visiting your page will be the effect of a bare page containing just the Flash animation.
If your site requires whole paragraphs of text, it is better to place it in the HTML, both from a search engine perspective and a user experience perspective. Keeping text in the HTML makes it easier for search engines to find the text and make sense of it. It also makes it easier for users to search through the text within the browser, print it, or copy and paste it.
Usage of links in HTML
Flash can be a great way to present complex navigation options to users using drop-down menus or other innovative controls. However, it can be difficult for web crawlers to find links when they are embedded only within the Flash animation. Simple solution to this is to make sure that any Flash navigation also appears somewhere on the page as links within the HTML. This can be done easily by putting links at the bottom or left side of a page. These standard practices are also helpful to the human visitors to your site, not just for search engine robots.
Provide a site index page your home page links to – This helps search engines navigate your site—whether or not you make heavy use of Flash. By doing so, human visitors can sense the layout and content of your site easily and web spiders definitely have an easier time hitting all the pages.
Another way to make sure search engines find all the pages in your site is to submit the page URLs directly to the search engines.
Use the Title and Description fields in Flash 8
The SWF file format in Flash 8 supports XMP metadata. The goal of this feature is to help address issues with search engine support for Flash. With this new feature, metadata can actually be output to any version of SWF, not just that generated by Flash 8. It is also a good idea to put this kind of information in your HTML, either in your page’s title and description metadata or in text within the page.
Use separate SWF files onto different web pages
Some websites built entirely in Flash use a single web page with a Flash animation embedded within it. When users interact with the site, new views are displayed within the Flash animation rather than by loading a new, discrete web page.
Although this can provide a great user experience visually and cause faster “page” loads, it has its drawbacks. For human visitors, it is impossible to bookmark a particular page because going back to that same link will take them to the beginning of the Flash experience. Similarly, it is impossible for search engines to understand each new state in the Flash experience as a different page and to link into that state.
