A short posting this week about Flash.
Many times, we encounter clients with Flash websites who wonder why they are not showing up in Google for certain keywords. The answer is simple: if the website and its content is comprised completely of Flash elements, there is nothing for the search engines to spider or index.
A quick note though: a bit of embedded Flash works just fine. There are many fine examples of SEO Friendly websites that integrate Flash movies into the content area of pages – this is because there is still HTML code, separate URLs, navigation, and content for the spiders to index.
Until the search engine spiders are able to read the contents of the Flash (.swf) files, it is best not to create an entire website in Flash. Though it is not impossible to optimize a pure Flash site, it will produce less than favourable results.
Here is an interesting article from our friend Ian McAnerin on some suggestions on how to optimize a Flash website using object tags:
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/flash-seo-01.asp
