SEO for Flash Optimization

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When you ever learn about flash it would be household name for multimedia and now it is associated with macromedia. What ever your website is about, if you are creating standalone movies, cool web components or interactive demos for presentation, flash would certainly a solid foundation. Flash movies are widely spread and eye-catching to the viewers. Flash optimization is really important and barrier between web/concept designers and SEO experts. Although, ranking is not only the way to make popular your website but that's truth, people use to search through engines for their needs. If you are presenting your website on commercial channel to draw attention of your visitors, you can achieve your goal easily; for spider case is different. With flash technology you can include pictures animations and sounds on your website. However, Flash movies are not so much rewarded with reference to ranking and spiders just ignore them without indexing, the reason is simple engines cannot index easily the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie; you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings.

Do you believe Search engine like Google Yahoo and MSN don't like mush flash based websites?

Engines dislike Flash Web sites because flash movies are complex for a spider. Spider cannot even index movie directly as they do with plan text.

Flash movies come in a binary format (.swf) and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without some assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that engine will crawl and index all your Flash content' never. Many of the SEO experts get confused with optimizing Flash website. There are many reasons behind, why spiders don't like flash movies. The most popular search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN don't dislike because of grandiosity but the fact is that, as mentioned earlier that, flash movies are really complex for a sandbox and slurp to digest. Until now, all spiders behave the flash website in the same way but in future there is chance that they react it in different ways. Once search engine understand what is there in content of (.swf) then it will definitely bring some smile to Flash webmasters.

Why we recommend not using Flash movies within your website or at least doing that minimum?

That's fact Flash movies are not that much favorite for spiders, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. SEO experts put maximum effort to find out the solution how to optimize for Flash website. When a website is under construction, people demand their web designers to make the site eye-catching, they demand to include banners in their website also ask to add movies within their websites. Flash movies are really thick, they hog bandwidth. Nowadays' IMB or above is not standard connection and majority is using dialup internet connection. The flash movies are good for visual presentation of theme of your content or story. If one has designed his complete website in flash, I will ask him not to dream for top ranking easily. Flash movies are attractive to view and common man understands that by applying maximum flash on his website, he will be rewarded. But this is not fact, you can only get good business though your website when there are visitors on your website. Not hundred percent but maximum people visit websites though search engines and spiders of engines do not like flash headers or movies to index. I recommend you to avoid using Flash movies and try to fit movie in a site minimum.

What you have to do while optimizing your flash based website.

Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this:

Input metadata of your webpage/website
Input metadata is an important approach. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, please keep in your mind that there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

Provide alternative pages
HTML pages don't force user to watch flash movie. To prepare these pages you may have to work hard but that will result in good ranking.

Flash Search Engine SDK (Software Development Kit)
SDK stands for software development kit. The most advanced tool to extract form flash movie named swf2html. Its name reflects, this tool extracts text and links from a Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document. Before this it was difficult to optimize your flash site for Google. Now you have tool kit on macromedia licensing page to free download SDK for your flash site. It will really help you if you are windows or Linux user. There is no version available if your platform is Mac. That's fact SDK saves your time as you have not to do all that manually, however, you still need to put your eye on extracted contents like you must look at your text if arranged and linked properly in order to write keyword rich content in title and heading of your index page. The second and important is you have to look for duplicate paragraphs and sentences extracted through SDK. You have to keep in mind that font color and background color should match and run that in hidden territory. These are few of the simple but important changes.

What is SE-Flash.com
SE-Flash.com is very useful tool. Even if you have installed your SDK, I recommend using this one because it provides one more check of the accuracy of extracted text. Most of the time, it is possible that popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN could not do anything to extracted sentences. Even you have installed Software Development Tool kit, use this one also. As, already mention that it's possible, search engine results change after using your se-flash tool. Here is another approach like creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie. Yes! This technique is correct that is, there is no duplicate or fake content and is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages', so I don't recommend this one.
I recommend using following link for detailed analysis and implementation.
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/search/faq/ The fact that your site is sandboxed does not mean that it is not indexed by Google at all. On the contrary, you could be able to top the search results from the very beginning! Looking like a contradiction with the rest of the article? Not at all! You could top the results for less popular keywords - sure, it is better than nothing. And while you wait to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords, you can discover that even less popular keywords are enough to keep the ball rolling, so you may want to make some optimization for them.