Optimizing flash sites for search engines

Okay, you visually impress your targeted audience when they visit your site with an interactive presentation. But how do people find your site? Web advertising always costs money, so your best solution is to optimize your flash site to rank better on search engines.

Search engines

A search engine assembles a big database with websites crawled on the web. It evaluates each page's rank depending on its content, site structure, incoming links quality and many other factors. The problem is that bots (robots that crawls and stock information about your site by jumping from link to link) can't navigate your flash site and can't see its content. They can't visually see the beauty of your presentation. All they see is the embed code which is no content at all. They can store your meta tags and site name which is often not enough to have good search engine position. We have below the best solutions in this scenario.

Part flash, part html site

One of the best solutions is to have html and flash site incorporated together (flash header and html content) or two sites versions (one html and the option of choosing flash). This way, you can impress both, bots and visitors. If you decide to go with the flash header make sure you also have links pointing to all your pages in the html code. The bot will be able to crawl the page. Upper content of a page is precious, before your header you can add a few descriptive lines for your site. The search engines give stronger weight for keywords placed in the beginning of a page. Don't just waste it with your embed flash tag! If you go with the second option, which is making two sites (flash and html) make sure your html is the main one. Have a link pointing to your flash page somewhere in your navigation. 

Google link reputation

Google has an algorithm that calculates PR (PageRank) for every site. It's based on the quality of the links pointing to your site. If your site is linked from a high PR page, your site's PR will elevate. Google uses a % of a site's PR to rank the website in the search results. It considers the text used to link to your site. A link from high PR site with link text "Click Here" won't help as much as "Free Flash Templates" (if your site's about templates). It also considers how many links there are on the page linking to you. Less PR will be transferred to your site if there are 500 links on your friend's site rather than only 5 links. If you master this technique it can produce very good results on google.com for flash sites.  

Tips :

- Make sure you clean your html code. Bots can have problems reading your pages if they encounter several errors (unclosed tags).

- Don't link to "bad neighborhoods" on the internet. It might be considered as spamming because google considers this as trying only to improve PR.