Last week, you read about the advantages and disadvantages of Flash—about its versatility, its application on the Web and its integration with Acrobat.
Yet, despite the fact that Flash based web applications, PDF documents and websites are now more interactive, colorful and dynamic than ever; they still struggle with one important feature--Search Engine Visibility. Webmasters with Flash content on their websites have always been presented with SEO challenges.
Due to the lack of search engine friendliness, most developers and webmasters have avoided using Flash content on their websites and web published PDFs.
Let’s take a more detailed look at a few SEO disadvantage points of Flash as well as a few strategies that are improving the visibility of your Flash content for Search Engines.
Flash Content and SEO Limitations
In order to understand why Flash content doesn’t get indexed by search engines, you first need to know that the basic structure of any site include “contents, style and behavior.�
When it comes to SEO, web crawlers ignore the style and behavior of any website. What they concentrate on is the content of a website.
If the content of the website or PDF document is based on Flash then that also gets ignored by the Search Engines.
Some other disadvantages that a Flash file can have from an SEO point of view are:
* Flash content has had problems getting indexed by Search Engines.
* URL navigation problem in the case of Flash websites. Each web page is a potential entry in your search engine ranking. But no matter how many pages you have in your Flash website, the URL will never update while you navigate among the pages in the Flash file. Websites developed completely in Flash suffer from PR distribution that’s limited to the main website address.
* High Loading time is always a problem with Flash websites. Secondly, if users don’t have Flash plugins installed, the website won’t load at all which makes for a bad user experience and poor marketing strategy.
* When it comes to Flash websites, you can’t update the content of the website as often as you can in the case of a plain text website. Moreover, the inability to update Flash content isn’t so good for a website’s visibility.
* With Flash
websites and Flash PDFs, almost all of your basic SEO aspects are
missing. As there is no textual content in such websites and PDFs,
there aren’t any header tags, bold or strong texts and no anchor texts
at all.
Strategies to make Flash Websites and Flash PDFs SEO Friendly
While there have been problems using Flash in the websites from a marketing point of view, the popularity of Flash is not affected. Having Flash integrated with Acrobat has opened up new horizons for using Flash.
Alongside this, the recent collaboration of Adobe, Flash and Google is working to improve Flash visibility with search engines. Here are a few things you can try to achieve better rankings in search engines with your Flash files:
* If you’re adding Flash to a website, the best strategy is to use scripts, java script or FlashObjects. Scripts let you define the layout and content of the page in plain text as you would do in the absence of Flash. This way you have better search engine visibility as well as users will know what the page is about if somehow the flash content fails to load in their browsers.
* Another workable option is to modify your Flash website and PDF. Never leave your web pages without text. Try to add text descriptions filled with keywords in the web pages containing the Flash content. PDF users should do the same with metadata.
* Google has updated the Flash content indexing ability of its crawlers. So now your Flash file can get noticed by Google. So a better SEO option is to rename your Flash files with meaningful keywords related to your business niche. For example, if your business is related to freight shipping then rename your abc.swf to freight_shipping.swf file. Doing so, your website’s Search Engine visibility will definitely increase.
* Now most search engines can read the text placed in the Flash files. Though the content grasping by crawlers in Flash files is still limited, if you place the text in your Flash file using the Text tool, the chances that it’ll get noticed by search engines increases
* Use search engine friendly Flash menus in your website. These menus have HTML links embedded in them in such a way that the crawler can crawl to the linked pages easily while reading these menus. Hence, your whole website can easily get indexed by the search engine crawlers.
Adobe’s efforts have given a new dimension and versatility to the Web and in particular to Google’s way of doing things.
We’ll leave you with this article about Adobe and their optimized Flash Player for search engines that opens up a few more ways in which you can optimize your Flash files. Hopefully, you’ll find a few pointers that’ll do the trick for your Flash content.
