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How to rank well with Flash movies
Flash movies are a popular way to make web sites more compelling.
They are useful if you want to impress your web site visitors
or if you offer web design services.
Unfortunately, if you use Flash movies, or if you even design
your complete web site based on the Flash technology, your
odds of getting listed in the search engines are greatly reduced.
Search engines can only "see" pure text. They are
not able to recognize text on an image or text that appears
as a graphic in a Flash movie.
Google advises
on its webmaster guidelines page: "If fancy features
such as [...] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site
in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble
crawling your site.".
AllTheWeb.com is able to recognize Flash files since September
2002. However, it's not able to recognize text in the Flash
movies.
So how can you achieve high search engine rankings in spite
of Flash contents?
First of all, you should re-consider using Flash on your
web site. Keep in mind that many visitors still use slow dial-up
connections to access web pages. They don't like to wait 1-2
minutes only to see your company logo fancy animated. Your
Flash movies must carry invaluable information to the visitors,
otherwise they will be disappointed.
Entry pages that only show your company logo are becoming
more and more annoying to users. Using web pages like company
brochures only show that your company didn't get the whole
Internet idea.
Keep in mind that not everyone has installed the Flash player.
Always add a link to a web page that contains the same important
information as found in the Flash movie in plain text.
For these reasons, not using Flash or building a duplicate
site without Flash are the easiest ways to make sure that
your web site visitors and the search engines can access your
web site.
If you really must use Flash on your web site, the following
tips can help you getting your Flash contents indexed by the
search engines:
- Provide links to alternate pages that contain a lot of
text and some keywords that the search engines can index.
- Place some text above and below your Flash movie that
contain your keywords. Along with your title and maybe your
meta tags, this gives the search engines some contents to
index.
- If you embed the Flash movie in your HTML code, use your
most important keywords in the movie filename using the
HTML tags <param name="movie" value="movie-filename.swf">
and <param name="src" value="movie-filename.swf>.
- You can use the <object standby="your message
to show while loading"> attribute to include some
text that is displayed while the Flash movie is being loaded.
In addition, you can use the <object title="your
movie title"> attribute to include a keyword-rich
movie title.
- Use the <noembed> tag to provide text for web browsers
which don't support the Flash plugin. Use it to describe
the contents of the Flash movie as search ngines can index
that description.
- You may want make your Flash movie transparent and place
it "over" your web page using CSS layers. This
web page explains the technique in detail.
- Some search engines (e.g. Inktomi) offer pay for inclusion
programs that guarantee the inclusion of your web page regardless
of the contents. Note that these search engines still need
text to index.
- You could provide an alternative, "pure text"
web page solely to search engine crawler programs. However,
this technique is called "cloaking" and search
engines don't like it (click
here for details).
- Link from other pages of your web site to your Flash page
with a keyword-rich link text.
- Use the Macromedia
Flash Search Engine SDK to convert a Flash file's text
and links into HTML for search engine indexing.
Macromedia, the developers of the Flash technology, have
recognized the difficulties in getting Flash contents indexed.
For this reason, they have developed an accessibility
kit that helps you to embed pure text and links in the
movie file.
Macromedia hopes that search engines will learn over time
to read the embedded text.
Flash is a trade mark of Macromedia Corp. You can find out
more about Flash here.
This
web site gives useful advice for making user-friendly
Flash sites.
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