Flash SEO

Flash SEO - Search Engine Optimization
By Ashley Peach

Optimizing your site for flash can be very difficult in this article I will show you a few things you do to increase your ranking in the major search engines.

Why flash has a problem:

The problem flash has with search engines is the current search engine spiders which crawl the web to find and index new sites cannot read flash files. I don’t believe flash will ever be read by search engines as it would just be to easy to abuse with ActionScript to hide text then you have layers etc which all could be used to abuse there search engine ranking and for this reason I don’t think search engines will index flash sites for the foreseeable future.

What are the options for full flash sites:

HTML:
Start over with html this is by far the best option. HTML is what search engines love to see and I doubt flash will ever be properly indexed by search engines where as HTML always will be.

Cloaking:
Cloaking is where you show the search engines something different than you show the user. For example when a user clicks your website a flash file is displayed which is your website. Where as when google bot visits the site a html document would be displayed containing relevant text to your website containing relevant h1, h2, and h3 tags as well as better title and description tags. Many technologies can cloak such as PHP, htaccess, ASP and many more server side languages.