Search Engine Optimization - Optimizing Flash Web Sites for SEO
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Optimizing Flash Web Sites for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
About Flash Sites and SEO
Flash sites are amazing works of art, that take a lot of time and effort to create. They are well worth it, because they leave your web site visitors with that, “Wow that site looks cool.” feeling. However, they aren’t the best sites for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) right out of the box. There are steps you need to take to optimize your flash based site for SEO.
Steps to Take to Optimize a Flash Site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
One of the fist things you will want to do to optimize your flash based site for SEO is create static HTML pages for each flash based web page you have. These will be nearly identical replicas of their flash counterparts, but they won’t be designed to re-direct to other HTML pages. You don’t need the HTML for customers, you need the HTML for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to index your site. The user will probably land on an HTML page if they click a natural search engine result to get to your site, but the first link they click will take them to the full flash version of your site.
You will need to put internal links to each of the pages on the site at the bottom of every flash designed page. This will help with the internal linking for your site. The search engines will not see those nice flash based menus you spent hours designing. By including the normal HTML style links at the bottom of the page, the search engines can crawl all of those static HTML pages you setup for the on page SEO.
Really, you won’t need to put a lot of content on the static HTML pages. They should be nothing more than a 200 to 300 word description, for which the page was designed. A lot of PHP based eCommerce sites use this strategy to optimize their software for SEO. This is to create static pages for every product in their catalog. This creates natural search engine traffic, linking directly to their product.
An example of this technique would be to create a products.html page for the products page on your Flash based site. Use 200 words or so with your selected keywords to describe absolutely everything on that page. You will also want to do some keyword research to determine the best keywords to use for your description. In addition, you will also want to go back and update these static pages on a regular basis, to keep them fresh in the search engine listings.
Include static graphics of any flash based images on that HTML page and use the ALT tag with those keywords. For example, you may have a image of a computer, and could title the ALT tag as ”my-keyword-computer-graphic” or something like that. Repeat this for every flash page on your site. Also remember to put internal links on all of these static HTML pages to each Flash page on the site.
This is only part of the battle in optimizing a flash based site for SEO as you will still need to do all of the off page SEO you would normally be doing for a static site. Create as many backlinks as humanly possible. Put something on your website that can be downloaded like a guide of report. This will provide an incentive for others to link to your site. Don’t put a direct link to the download, but create a button or something that would require the user to visit the download page to be able to download the file. The higher the demand for this download, the more backlinks you are going to get from it. You could create a contest on a blog for people with blogs or sites that do not use the “no follow” setting. This way the links would all count, and even though the blogs using the “no follow” option would still generate traffic to your site.
