Design Optimization- Optimize Flash for Search Engines
First of all, I would like to stress that optimizing a Flash site is different from optimizing a HTML site with embedded Flash movies. An entire Flash site has nothing for the Search Engine to index and it also lack of content. My advise is to create a HTML site with embedded Flash movies because it is the content and HTML codes that get indexed by the Search Engine eventually. The following discusses some of the methods you can utilize to optimize your Flash movies.
Flash movies, not Flash sites
As mentioned above, a Flash site has many disadvantages when it comes to Search Engine visibility. The only way to improve Flash site is to create another HTML version of the site for the Search Engine indexing purposes. Once you have the HTML version of the site, you can start to apply the other techniques found in <"http://www.useseo.com">USESEO to optimize your site.
Important tags for Flash movies optimization
The following are the important tags to include your content and keywords for the Flash movies so
that they can be indexed by the Search Engine bots easily.
-<noscript>
-<object>
-<title>
-<meta>
Should CSS layers-hidden be used?
Some web developers have created a hidden content layer that is invisible to the users and its purpose is to provide content and keywords to the Search Engine bots only. However, Search Engines may look at it in a different way, cloaking. This method is not advisable as we never know to what extent will the Search Engine consider before deciding whether the hidden content is of good intention.
SDK for Search Engine Optimization
To date, there is still no official announcements from the major Search Engines that they can fully index Flash content even with the use of Software Developer Kit (SDK) from Macromedia. SDK includes an application named 'swf2html'. Swf2html extracts content from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data as an HTML document. Using this kit will ensure that at least some of the content is indexed. However, how deep and accurate is the extraction will need to be uncovered by the users.