Inspiring

Question

SEO and Flash, can they ever be friends

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
January 5, 2009
21 replies
5251 views

Hi All,

I have recently been questioning the SEO side of things; and am currently trying to better optimize my site. I use quite a lot of flash on my site, and it sorted dawned on me that Flash is doing me no favours when it comes down to SEO - I will need to get a good ranking, as this year I will be putting a lot of money and time into making our site a success story ;)

Am I a little green on this or what?

Anyone know any tips/tricks on how best to bring SEO and Flash together, to better work in page ranking?

What do folks with totally 100% Flash sites do when it comes down to SEO? As there is only a few meta tags and title tag available?

I love Flash, and would never let go! However, this SEO thing will always be a "Flash Avoidance" for new clients; how can one best assure them that Flash provides more than just a better brand image?

A few weeks ago, a potential client stated "I would never have a flash menu".

Kind Regards,

Boxing Boom

ActionScript

This topic has been closed for replies.

ajuever

Participant

Hello,

I just conducted an experiment, and as a result I found flash pages are not coming even in the top 100 of google for any keyword search. Its better to feed html for search engine crawler.

Regards

aju

Darshan_Rane

Inspiring

Hi

For the SEO part i didnt find any solution as of now than making my text selectable in flash.

For deeplinking problem which i was facing in IE, it got solved. As we have to include a swfaddress.html page in same folder as swfaddress.js (which calls it in an iframe). If the browser is IE the iframe gets called in background and swfaddress.html file is loaded in it.

Darshan_Rane

Inspiring

Hi Cyboide,

Thanks for the reply on SEO part

For IE my deeplinking is not working (back and forth btn), maybe i havedone something wrong with the code. For now i am just passingthe ids instead of complete section/subsection name.

Later i will include section/subsection name instead of id number.

C

Cyboide

Participating Frequently

Hi Darr,

SWFAddress should also work in IE...

For the SEO stuff, its mainly in the background that it happens.
You should have an HTML page for every "page" in your Flash, with the same HTML navigation. (It would have been nice to know your website's address...)

Example:
In Your Flash, of course you have your home page, and lets say you also have a menu "Services" with "Cards" and "Flyers" submenus, and a menu "Contact".
Your HTML tree would be like this:
domain.com/index.html
domain.com/services/cards/index.html
domain.com/services/flyers/index.html
domain.com/contact/index.html

(If the btn "Services" would also have its own content :
domain.com/services/index.html )
Note that the words used for the tree should be exactly the same as those you send to the navigator with Flash. (and you can use dashed words like this : /printing-cards/ ... for SEO purposes)

The only downside is that all of your actual HTML pages have to be called index or default, which, for SEO, is one chance less to include your keywords. (Though I have yet to try giving swfaddress.js a path that finishes with "pagename.html"...)

So you would send an XML sitemap to Google (or include it in your HTML) and you would want to use SWFAddress's Google Analytics function (err, just read Asual's documentation when your there).

Again, for your IE problem, I don't know. But I also do deeplinked website not on the timeline and it works fine.

____________________

Design Cyboïde

Darshan_Rane

Inspiring

Hey Guys

I tried swf address in one of my site which dont have any timeline navigation.
I have a comon function which updates the URL and also changes the state of hte site (like moving from one section to another).Back and forth button works fine in firefox

The problem is itdoesnt work in IE as it is not storing any history.

Also how can we encorporate SEO using swfaddress. I have a CMS from where i am pulling all the data.

mikeumus

Known Participant

Pardon me if this was already mentioned, but the relative book publisher O'Reilly is in the works of authoring a new title:

"Search Engine Optimization for Flash"

The "Rough Cuts Version" is available now @

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596157272/

B

Boxing_BoomAuthor

Inspiring

Hi,

Great! About time too ;) Nice one mikeumus.

Kind Regards,

Boxing Boom

kglad

Community Expert

sounds good.

N

Newsgroup_User

Inspiring

Using text that is the same color as the background is considered a
"black hat" technique. Google can detect if you are doing that and can
penalize your rankings. If you have to do this at least use a tiled
graphic that is the same color.

I prefer to put seo text into the noscript section.

TR

kglad wrote:
> i suspect there are books on this subject and there's certainly a lot more info
> than can be posted in a forum.
>
> for my part, when i care about search engine placement, i add html text (that
> can easily be spidered by search engines) to the bottom of my flash-embedding
> html page. i use a tiny font that has the same color as the page's background
> so no human sees the text unless they check the html source code.
>
> but google is spidering flash content now and i see they have kglad.com in
> first position when searching for kglad. (and that site has no non-flash
> content and no "invisible" text.)
>

G

Greg Dove

Inspiring

I completely understand if you're creating the content in flash - from the 'ground up' like you say.
If however the content is separate and can be mirrored as an html version then you can just use flash as like an alternate 'renderer' of the content (which could include other swfs, images, text etc). A CMS is ideal for doing this and helps with SEO because you can have a plain html version of the same content. SWFaddress helps you get from the search engine query results that return the 'plain vanilla' html address to the content into the flash-rendered (and hopefully more engaging) version of that content. There is still a bunch of work involved in doing that, including setting things up on the php side/configuring the cms etc - I won't say its plain sailing, e.g. integrating a shopping cart would require something dedicated to supporting part of that flash-side but as an overall approach it does offer another option for SEO optimization.

I found the podcast that got me interested in this originally. Here it is:
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/drupal_podcast_no_34_scott_nelson_services_and_amfphp

B

Boxing_BoomAuthor

Inspiring

Hi All,

Great to see this thread is still alive ;)

Just wanted to bring "Video search engine optimization" into the mix, the following url addresses this:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/914-Product-Video-Easy-Distribution-Tools

And be sure to check out TubeMogul.com ;) I have made contact with Brett personally, his very approachable, no need to be shy folks - their video distribution, IMHO The Best!

I do hope the link above and all previous links will/have improved your own/clients page ranking etc...
This now concludes my SEO research venture. Righty then, now just where was that pub, hmmm. ;)

Kind Regards,

Boxing Boom

kglad

Community Expert

a couple of years ago i started to help urami with a website that she was building (an ecommerce site) and she wanted to incorporate swfaddress for its deep-linking.

her site had no timeline navigation and only some loading of external swfs. quite a lot of it involved users adding products to their shopping cart as well as timeline animation.

i was able to extend swfaddress so we were able to use it in quite a few application states but in the end it became unwieldy to store every application state and i gave up.

storing the flash application state in a project built (from the ground up) with that in mind is possible but for sophisticated applications (like even the simplest ecommerce site) it adds quite a bit of complexity to the mix.

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