Optimize a flash website

A flash website is a piece of art for a web designer but is a nightmare for an SEO expert. It has every reason to be called a great technology as it includes a picture and sound effect to a website, but it makes SEO’s heart jumping in his / her throat at a mere mention of it. The reason behind these different approaches is simple to understand. The mighty Gods of the world of web, namely search engines do not index flash pages. The only way left to get a flash website indexed is to feed the pages with some content. But then you lose the battle when it comes to page ranking in the search results. Let’s try some workarounds. Though these workarounds are a clumsy task to perform, they are better than having nothing in your kitty for your site rankings.

Why search engines hate flash?

The reason as to why the search engines dislike flash sites is a simple one to decipher. These flash movies or clips are too complicated for search engine spiders to crawl or understand. The spider sees and read a flash clip as blank sheet so cannot index it as it does not derive a meaning out of it. The flash site comes in a binary format (.swf) and the spiders cannot read inside the flash file. Now if the content of the site is not available for the spiders to crawl then how they can index it. At least, not without any assistance . Till this time all the search engines are united in their approach to flash though there are differences in the relevancy given to weigh these sites. Yes search engines hate flash sites. Though some search engines are divided on the question of indexing portions of flash sites, but all of them are unanimous in their approach to them.

Why flash is a no?

Well it is not only that the search engines dislike flash but also for various other reasons its use is restricted. For example as a banner or other kind of advertisement a flash clip distracts the mind of the visitor hence he skips it, avoid it. So it loses the whole point of its being. It didn’t work for the advertiser. The second reason why it is not always a healthy option is its being fat. Yes the flash file consumes a lot of bandwidth. Though the dial up days are over still 1 MB or more is not established as standard.

The web designers should understand that flash is good for enhancing the effect of story, and not the story telling itself. You should have a main body of text to make your point clear and a flash clip can be added to enhance the effect. By doing so you appeal to the senses of your visitors and keep the web bots also engaged. Now this kind of arrangement is a win win situation for a webmaster. But a complete site made in flash is an unpardonable SEO sin and all dreams of getting high page rank will automatically be dashed.

The other place where also one should not use flash is for the purpose of navigation. The rule applies not only to the main starting page but also to the other ones in the site. Using images or java script for navigation is not permitted in SEO practice. Text links are only SEO approved way for site navigation.

Optimizing flash site

Though it is a clumsy task and not always an easy solution but a flash website can also be optimized.

· Use of metadata ---- this one is very important approach though it is most misunderstood and underestimated. Flash development tools easily allow to use metadata in your flash file to make the language, tools used and the content specified, visible to search engines and visitors. Now with this task done there is no lame excuse left to be given for an empty metadata space.

· Alternative html pages ----- now to make your flash site more visible to spiders one can add only html pages to the site. By doing so you give an alternative to your visitors to skip the flash movie clip and directly read and understand the content. It also enhances the visibility of your website to search engine spiders as they see only html pages. Preparing these pages is an extraneous task but definitely helpful.

· SDK tool ---- this search engine flash site tool is the life line of any flash website. This tool is able to extract text from a flash movie. One of the handiest application of this flash search engine SDK tool is swf2html. As the name suggest it extracts the text information in any flash clip and convert it into html file. The whole job is done automatically but at times one need to have a look at the converted content and if needed the restructuring should be done. Also one should check out for if there is any duplicate content in the extracted paragraphs and sentences. Other important aspect of this tool is to check the font colour every time of the extracted content because if the colour is same as of the background then you can be booked for hidden text black hat practice by the search engine police.

· SF Flash tool ----- this tool is almost similar to sdk tool as it view your website from the eyes of a search engine. Thus help you to learn about the flaws in your site with respect to search engines. Also it is more helpful with Google which does not use SDK.

These above specified tools and means are the ethical ones while it comes to optimize a flash site. There are several other techniques also which are used by webmasters to optimize a flash site but those are not considered favorable by search engines as they are counted as black hat practices like creating invisible layers of text that is visible to spiders. Avoid using that stuff otherwise more than optimizing your site it will bring trouble.

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