Posts Tagged “SEO”

My most recent title on Lynda.com is about creating search engine friendly sites. In the title, I demonstrate how to optimize sites that contain heavy amounts of Flash content. I’ve written about Flash SEO here, as well as on InsideRIA, and also wrote a book called Search Engine Optimization for Flash (for those of you who want detailed info on Flash SEO).

One issue in my Lynda title is that the examples worked in Safari and not FireFox (I fixed that by the way, and the new files/movies should be on the Lynda site now, or very soon). The problem actually had nothing to do with Flash- it was a FireFox issue regarding the way the browser handles CSS percentages. Because of the issue, FireFox was not rendering the Flash content or the alternate content I set up. Not cool.

Here’s the solution- FireFox needs to have percentages setup for every parent element of the element that is to use CSS percentages. So if <div id=”flashContent”> is inside of <div id=”someOtherDiv”>, and you want the flashContent div to take up 100% of the browser window, you have to set someOtherDiv to be 100% as well, along with the element(s) that div is in (maybe just the body tag, for example), and the html tag. Here’s an example of the CSS rule you’d need to use:

html,body,div#someOtherDiv,div#flashContent {
width:100%;
height:100%;
}

So remember, when you’re using percentages for an element in CSS, always also use percentages for each of that elements parents, all the way up through the html tag.

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.

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Today is the last day to enter to win a copy of Todd’s book Search Engine Optimization for Flash. Tomorrow, we’ll announce the winner, and that person will be filled with unspeakable joy, beyond the likes any human has heretofore seen…probably.

I’m really excited about my new book- Search Engine Optimization for Flash. The book shows how to optimize Flash based websites to rank higher in search engine results. As an effort to promote this book, we’re giving away a free copy through this site.

All you have to do to win a copy of the book is make a comment on this post, following these rules:

• One comment per person, per day
• Comment must contain a Flash related question that can be answered via a blog post (e.g. How do you create HTML links in Flash?)
• Comment must be made on this post before 12:00am Pacific Time Wednesday, April 15

The winner will be chosen based on the quality of the Flash question asked (chosen by me- i.e. my favorite question wins), and will receive one copy of Search Engine Optimization for Flash, as well as the answer to the question in the form of a blog post on this site. Have fun!