Search Engine Optimisation on full Flash websites

”Does Google index your swf files?”

Seems to be the most popular question… After lots of googling we found out there are widely two methods to make a flash website well optimized for a search engine.



Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy and time that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of an usual HTML site.



The first technique is splitting the content which has to be crawled by Google and other search engines into a different section and making the design a separate one. The second one is Designing and animating flash in such a way how Google mentions that in web masters area.



The best way to do the first option is by using JavaScript or a script like swf object . By using this we are loading the flash content into a div using the id of the div. Spit out the required content into this div which will be crawled by Google. Then we can use the swf object to replace the content only if the user has Javascript enabled and the required Flash plugin version.



You can get more description about this point here: http://blog.deconcept.com/2006/03/13/modern-approach-flash-seo/





For the second point you are supposed to design the flash file in such a way how they mention in webmaster central. At present Google can only discover and index textual contents and links inside a flash file. And also Google can not recognize or index any text that may appear in images. Similarly, they do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Another important point is they cannot index flv files as they do not contains any text elements. The improvements that Google had made to crawl swf files do not require any special action on the part of web designers or web masters.





For more details on how Google index your swf file: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html