Make Flash Sites More Searchable - 1
HTML
Most internet users are yet to figure out what it means when a tool tip slides down the browser window with blocked pop-ups or missing plugins. If your target audience is largely made up of such users, using flash is a bad idea.
Flash sites are without doubt beautiful. But think twice before using flash, and twice more before using flash-only. Crawling of all non-HTML files by search engines needs special processing, takes longer, and is comparatively less effective.
Animated words inside flash can be especially hard to catch. (Imagine all the letters of a word flying in from a direction each, and colliding to form the word.) So embed the flash files and all possible content separately in HTML: keywords and descriptions, and all links. If one of the links is a site index, better. If you can provide an alternate HTML-only version of the site, great.
Read previous post of the series here.
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It would be good if you linked to good articles / sites which are doing this, otherwise you post isn’t really saying much…
Mentioning good libraries such as SWFObject:
http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject
which is both search engine friendly and allows Flash to replace content IF the user has the capability would be a good start.
Also, a PDF on a good architecture for Flash + SEO technique can be found on the Avenue A site:
www.avenuea-razorfish.com/articles/SOFA.pdf
Regards,
Aran
Thank you, Aran. I shall give examples everywhere possible. And double thanks for the great links!
Dont forget ajax, same problems.