Flash has always suffered from being a black box to search engines. Even if SWFs were readable by search engines it wouldn’t help because any respectable RIA these days gets its content related data elsewhere. At the very minimum the content is stored in XML file(s) that don’t follow any kind of standard or in a database, both of which lock away your content from search engines. And if that weren’t enough, most Flash applications only have one HTML page and that doesn’t exactly increase your chances of a good ranking, no matter how good your alternate content and meta tags are.

Thankfully there are things like SWFAddress that can really make a difference in the SEO battle. SWFAddress allows you to have independent urls and titles for every page in your Flash site along with providing a mechanism for deep linking. Downloading SWFAddress gets you AS classes for all three flavors, the SWFAddress JavaScript file and a variety of excellent examples.

Combine this with the Sitemap Protocol and now we’re cooking with fire!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 2:26 pm and is filed under SEO, HTML/JavaScript, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.