Until 2008, one of the common concerns for websites made in flash was the poor search visibility on Google. Google couldn’t follow the links and texts on the websites made using flash. Despite the usage of flash format in a large number of sites, Google and Flash had been like water and oil, they never mixed.

Then finally, Adobe released a breakthrough improvement over Google’s ability to index Flash. But currently it still needs a substantial amount of improvement in order to be read properly by Google.

In order to help the search engines index your Flash website’s contents, here are a few best SEO practices for Flash websites:

1. Build Independent HTML pages: Create separate HTML pages with different URLs for all your flash pages. Each of the HTML pages must deep link to the suitable portions of the flash movies.

2. SWFObject: Always embed the flash files using SWFobject and SWFobject2 which will help you exhibit the alternate content for HTML and use text content in alternate HTML which should be matching the flash content as far as possible.

3. Restrict the over usage of Flash: Try to avoid over usage of flash and try to wrap the flash elements in the HTML navigation as far as possible.

4. Creation of alternate HTML content: If the flash content is generated through an external XML file, use the same XML file to create an alternate HTML content.

5. Discoverability of Links: If the flash file includes links to the other pages of your website, you can increase your chances of Google indexing the links and content of the website.

SEO using Frames

Using frames in website design makes it difficult for the search engines to index your website’s content and links. A webpage with frames generally consists of three files (instead of the traditional one), where one is used for the body content, second for the navigation and the third is used to bind them together as a web page. Frames are now considered a dead technology. By using “NOFRAMES” you can combat the problem to some extent, but overall you would do better to avoid frames anywhere on your website.

JavaScript and Indexing

If Flash is considered hard for indexing, JavaScripts are even harder to be found and spidered by the search engines, if they aren’t used properly. The browsers with turned off JavaScript makes your site completely unusable if it is developed with JavaScript navigations. In the worst circumstances, if you need to have JavaScript placed; try to avoid inserting the codes at the beginning of the HTML file and place them at the bottom instead or even better if placed in an external .js file. The latter has a few advantages as well:

1. It makes your HTML page load faster

2. You can instruct the robots of search engines NOT to read the .js files.

3. The indexing of the pages becomes faster

Dynamic Sites

The dynamic sites require focused search engine optimisation strategies as dynamic sites are still considered difficult to get indexed unless they are properly optimized. Even if the search engines claim that they can now index the dynamic sites, their positioning can be a major issue. Their crawlers currently are not trained to understand the dynamic databases of URLs containing special characters, also called string urls. To fight the indexing hurdle, conversion of the dynamic URLs into search engine friendly URLs is the first step. Alternatively, place the dynamic links on your static pages to help the crawlers to find your dynamic pages.

While the usage of Ajax, Flash and JavaScript enhances the user experience on your website, they still continue to offer less than ideal experience for the robots and crawlers. Do you think it’s practical to have these elements to compete in the highly competitive SEO industry? The decision is yours!