Flash is a great way of creating exciting multimedia content for your website, using a format that is now accessible by the vast majority of web users. However, one of the downsides of using Flash is that it has not traditionally been very search engine optimization (SEO) friendly.
While Google and Yahoo have now introduced new Flash indexing features to their search engines, the general consensus is that Flash is still a bit of a problem child in the SEO world.Text is not indexed the same way in Flash that it is in traditional HTML pages, and there are a number of other handicaps that still make heavy reliance on Flash risky as far as search engine optimization goes.
That is not to say that Flash pages don’t get indexed; there are web developers who have managed to achieve high rankings with pure Flash sites. However, Flash SEO is still relatively new, and designers should be aware that results may vary.
However, there are ways for a website developer to have their cake and eat it too (or at least have some of their cake and get a good taste at the same time). Dependable Flash SEO isn’t quite as easy to implement as traditional SEO, but it can be done.
One method is to create a search engine friendly page in HTML, complete with all the elements that would normally be search engine optimized (headings, links, alt tags, content, etc.). You then utilize the open source ‘swfobject()’ Javascript function on the page. When a regular visitor (with Flash installed) visits the page, the script replaces your optimized content with your Flash content. The visitor gets the full multimedia experience, without viewing the ‘boring’, (but search engine optimized) HTML content.
However, when a search engine spider shows up that can’t handle Flash, the Javascript lets it proceed to the SEO friendly HTML code. Your content is spidered, and as long as you’ve done your SEO job, your site will meet its search engine optimization goals.
Keep in mind that in order to avoid being labelled as ‘black hat’ SEO, this method requires you to keep the HTML content faithful to the Flash content. Don’t pad the HTML page with content that isn’t available to the Flash user, or your site may be labelled as spam by search engines.