Flash Optimisation

There is much confusion from deisgners concerning if their content can be indexed by search engines and if they have a chance of ranking in the search engines. Recently at the WebmasterWorld Conference in Las Vegas Tim Mayer from Yahoo held a seminar talking about good site structure for rankings in Yahoo, in the power point presentation he touched upon Flash content and a few things that can be done to make the content indexable (and also worth while). Thanks to Ysearchblog for putting his power point show online.

Firstly we have a few facts from Yahoo. Yahoo! does not currently crack open flash files to follow links or extract textual elements. Macromedia provided the SDK but extracting text from .swf files provided little value due to the small amount of text within flash files and much of this text was not useful (“skip intro”). Content providers did not optimize their flash content for search engines.

Here are a few tips that you can do top optimise the content of your flash movies:

• Make sure relevant content is text in the .swf files
• Create plenty of descriptive text & meta info for the header of the page
• Put user prompts such as “skip intro” as graphical content
• Create both a “flash” and “html” site versions
• href links in html as a footer on each page
• Make sure that the title tags are keyword rich sentences and specific for all pages

All of that is good solid advice and I would imagine that it holds true with all search engines even though there has been no word from Google or MSN. If anyone has tried to convince a Flash designer that we are going to need to replicate the site to a certain degree in HTML, they will know that it can be very difficult... good luck though. Looking through the Flash Forum can also provide you with help and a few tips.