By Aisling Brennan
Online Marketing Account Manager
In November of last year Google announced that they had "chosen not to index the majority of Flash files at this time...". As a result optimising a website that is designed in Flash is a challenge, however it can be accomplished with a little resourcefulness and a lot of perseverance.
As the crawlers cannot read the content embedded within Flash files, any relevant descriptive text or tag contained within the swf file is rendered useless. However follow the tips below to help the search engine crawlers to read and index any available content.
Tips for Optimising Existing Flash Website:
- Some engines, i.e. AllTheWeb, transform the text within the swf file to HTML so ensure ALL content is relevant
- Ensure there is 300+ word description of content with important keywords peppered throughout titles/headings and mentioned liberally and early within the body text.
- Ensure there is plenty of keyword-focused title, keyword and description Meta Tag information
- Put user prompts such as Skip Intro as graphical content
- Remove all detection scripts from index.html to external include files
- Ensure navigation is HTML-based and not Flash-based to enable the spiders to crawl throughout the site
- Use keyword-rich object tags
- Use keyword-rich embed tags
- Don't use the ID attribute
- Use descriptive urls
- Don't use flash pop-up windows as they can be blocked by pop-up blockers, and won't be found by the spiders unless linked from the homepage
- Include robots.txt file
- Ensure abundance of internal cross linking occurs within site
- Include links to relevant external sites
Ultimately what the search engines want is for website designers to move away from launching one Flash file to multiple Flash files surrounded by keyword-focused HTML navigation, links, images and relevant descriptive text.
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