Search Engine Optimization with Flash

As an SEO, you understand the importance of search engine rankings, and the best methods on achieving positioning. But to your client, what they really want are sales, and for visitors to buy their product and turn into customers. They want all that and more. So even if they understand the importance of what you are trying to convey to them, they still want the pretty site, because perception is everything. They know they may have the best product in the world, but if the package is ugly, people are less likely to buy. And they believe this about their website also. So it’s your job to make them happy, and ultimately, bring them the sales. They want the pretty site, packaged in the glossy box, and they want it optimized in the same breath. You can try to convince them of your view, but in the end, they want their cake and eat it too.

So how do you accomplish all that? Here are a few ways to increase user experience without sacrificing ranking.

Use Flash movies, not sites
Crawler based search engines still prefer html versus images, flash, and other scripts. But if you embed your glitzy flash movies into your content-rich HTML, you will still get the benefits of optimization. While search engines like Google, AtomzSearch, HotBot, and FAST engines (AlltheWeb, InfoSpace, and Lycos) are getting better at extracting links from flash sites, it is still very difficult for them, and other third party search engines have made no mention of extracting useful information from Flash. Yahoo claims they can read .swf files, but so far I’ve not seen any evidence that they read enough content to usefully rank a Flash site in its index.
A better way to incorporate Flash, if indeed your client must have it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners. These areas are usually of little importance to a search engine anyway, so it seems fine to do it this way. In which case, optimizing this type of site is no different than optimizing a plain ole HTML site. This is my top recommendation for Flash.

Just as you would caution against using images for your important text, keywords, and other important aspects of your site, the same reasoning applies to Flash in these cases. If you are using several competitive keywords, then you will be well advised to split your pages up by topic, instead of using one web page, and then using multiple Flash movies for each page.