In response to Brian’s request, here are my top three tips for boosting your Flash based site’s ranking in search engine results.

First, add a page title to your HTML file. When you publish HTML from Flash, you get an HTML page to house your SWF file, and the page title is generated for you. The problem is that many people don’t take the time to change it, and use file names like project_1_new.fla, so the title for the page ends up being project_1_new. Not very descriptive, seeing as a page’s title is your biggest chance for impact when your site shows up in a search. If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then you may think of page titles as those things at the top of your browser window that don’t matter too much:

But check out the significance of page titles in a web search:

To add a page title to your page, open up your HTML page (created from Flash, or whatever app you use) in a text editor (Dreamweaver, Notepad, TextEdit), and type a descriptive title for your page in the title tag. It looks like <title></title>. So your descriptive title tag should look something like <title>This is the new, improved, descriptive title tag</title>. Your page’s title should accurately describe the content of your page, and should contain keywords that are relative to that page in your site. In other words, your goal is to write a concise description of the page’s content that contains keywords people are likely to search for to find sites like yours.

Second, use SWFObject. The SWFObject site has many examples of how to use it, so I won’t go into all the code here, but this provides an extremely easy way to include searchable HTML as alternate content for people and search engines that can’t see Flash. I highly recommend using SWFObject’s Dynamic Publishing method for any Flash content that needs improved searchability.

Finally, in conjunction with SWFObject, provide searchable HTML alternate content. When you use SWFObject (I’m a huge fan of the SWFObject code generator by the way), you can control what people and search engines see if they don’t have a Flash version sufficient to see your Flash application. Here, provide an accurate representation of your Flash content using HTML. That means you can use HTML tags to add emphasis in your alternate content (i.e. headings, HTML links, etc.), which increases the searchability of your Flash based page dramatically, while at the same time actually providing a way for people to see a version of your site even if they don’t have the Flash Player! For examples of this, see the site http://www.dorothybrodsky.com/, and behold its Flashingly awesome glory.

Then, disable Flash in your web browser to see what the site looks like if you don’t have Flash, or visit the site on a non-Flash device like an iPhone.

Of course there are many more things you can do to improve the SEO in your site, but these three things will give you the most bang for your buck. By devoting very little development time employing these techniques, you can greatly enhance your site for both search engines and people.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 6:30 pm and is filed under SEO, Uncategorized, flash.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.