* Input metadata This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty. * Provide alternative pages For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages. * Flash Search Engine SDK This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious job to do it manually. However, you still need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning of the page. Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory. * SE-Flash.com Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will produce.
My first tip for optimizing with Flash is: don't. If you just create your site in HTML, you'll know your files will be search-engine friendly--because HTML is what search engines are best at. All search engines can spider basic HTML documents. In order for a search engine to spider a Flash document, its developers have to download and install the Macromedia SDK kit. And why make search engines go out of their way to get to your files? Creating a whole website in Flash is just a bad idea. Although they look "flashy"--pardon the pun--they are not search engine friendly. On top of that--in our humble opinion--90% of Flash websites are not user-friendly either. And on top of that, you usually need special software to make minor changes. So, every time you want to put up a news article or change a misspelling, you have to hire an expert to do it. Flash Optimization Tips If you really, really feel that you can't live without building a website in Flash, there are a few things you can do to make your website more search engine friendly: * The best thing to do is to place your Flash files inside of regular HTML files. This way you can at least include the META information. Even better, put some HTML above or below the Flash element to provide some spiderable content for search engines. * Include plenty of text in your Flash files. Search engines that can read Flash files (with the Macromedia SDK) will still only see the text. So, make sure that it is relevant and keyword rich. * Make sure the text in your Flash files is something that you want the search engines to see. "Click Here to Enter" is not very good spider-food. * Google follows links in Flash files. So use keyword-rich anchor text, just like you would with regular HTML. * Provide a non-Flash version of the site for spiders. This is also good for those without the Flash player plugin and those with slow connections. * Name files correctly. That is, include keywords in the file names separated by dashes. For example, flash-optimization.html. The following methods are legit, but have great potential for abuse: * You may consider putting your Flash website into frames and placing an HTML version of the website in the NOFRAMES tag. Of course, search engines don't particularly like frames either, but this is certainly preferable to having a pure flash page. See more on search engine optimization for frames. * The Macromedia Flash Accessibility Kit allows you to export the text from your Flash file to a NOSCRIPT tag. Do this. This tag is read by screen-reader users and those without Flash players. The contents of this tag can also be read by search engines. If you use either of the above methods. Please, do not abuse these tags. These tags are there for a reason: to make the Internet more accessible to all. They are not created for you to use them as keyword dumps. Place valid content in these tags. If you use the NOFRAMES tag, create an actual HTML document that you would want users to see if they did not support frames. If you use the NOSCRIPT tag make sure that it contains information that you would like those with accessibility issues to see (or hear). For the sake of everyone involved in optimization--and to preserve the integrity of search results for users--do not stuff keywords in these tags. If SEO's begin to abuse these tags--as SEO's and webmasters abused the keyword tags--they will make the tags useless for all. Search engines will be forced to ignore the content within the tags. And the legit use for the tags will be ruined for everyone. What not to do in Flash Optimization There are scripts out there that will detect the presence of a human vs. a search engine visitor, and will deliver "appropriate" content to each. That is, it will deliver the Flash pages to a visitor, and search-engine-friendly HTML pages to search engines. This practice, however, is exactly what search engines DON'T want you to do. They want to see exactly what a real visitor is seeing. Such cloaking of pages holds a huge potential for abuse. And it is our opinion that directing search engines to a set of non-Flash web pages is spam.
TOTALLY agree. Flash sites are the absolute worst when it comes to SEO. Rewrite your site in HTML and save yourself LOTS of head aches down the road. People are going to say, "Google and Yahoo can read Flash now!" Well yea... they now have the specifications for Adobe's binaries... But they've been reading flash for years with their own homegrown tools by reverse engineering the Flash binaries. Problem is, the search engines' databases, indexers, ranking algorithms, backend tools, etc. have ALL been built on the premise of indexing and ranking HTML, NOT Flash. Matt Cutts said at last year's Pubcon that it will be at least a decade before the search engines are able to index and rank Flash sites even relatively well and that HTML sites will ALWAYS outrank an equivalent Flash site. I rarely see a Flash site that couldn't have been duplicated using HTML. The BIGGEST problem with Flash is that most flash sites have the site navigation embedded inside the Flash. So you end up with one big SWF that gets indexed at a single URL. Consider if you have a 50 page site in HTML. Each page is easily indexed separately and can focus on a single targeted keyword phrase. Each page has it's OWN set of on page and on-site ranking factors that can be focused on the targeted keyword phrase - <title>, <h1>, <h2>, content, keyword density, link text of inbound links, etc. So I get 50 <title>s, 50 <h1>s, countless <h2>s, etc. Now imaging taking all of that content from the 50 pages about 50 different topics and cramming it into a single HTML page. I only have 1 <title>, 1 <h1>, a handful of <h2>s, etc. with which to target 50 different keyword phrases. My keyword density for any one targeted phrase was likely just decreased to 1/50th (2%) of what it was when I had a page targeting just that one keyword. This is basically what you have with most Flash sites. If your site is written in Flash you will be 99.99% dependent on inbound links from other sites in order to rank. It's easy to rank 50 pages for 50 different targeted keyword phrases. It's almost impossible to rank a single page for 50 different targeted keyword phrase. Do yourself a favor. Pay someone to rewrite your site in HTML. Use an occasional Flash component for a cool little ad here and there on an HTML page. But NEVER use Flash to build a site. It's a terrible idea. Web designers like it because it's cool, fun, kind of like filming for TV... but from a search perspective it's one of the most lame technologies to build a site in.
flash sites aren't all that bad if you know what your doing and think things out a little. here is a decent article I found on google with a quick search: How to SEO Flash I suggest you read up on the subject before saying flash sites are no good for SEO
I read that article and many others just like it in the past. Still think it's a bad idea... The article (and most others) essentially promote maintaining a search engine friendly version of the same content that is in the Flash and having the web pages decide if the requesting agent has the Flash plugin. If so it displays Flash, if not displays the search engine friendly version of the page(s). But IMO this is still terrible if for no other reason from a maintenance perspective because it means double the work - basically maintaining an HTML and Flash version of your site. And if you want to redesign your site or you modify content within the flash, you will need to modify it within the HTML version as well so that the HTML content is "equivalent" to the same content in the Flash. There is rarely a good reason to implement a site in Flash other than the web designer just thinks flash is more fun to work with. You "could" use HTML pages for your site to render all site navigation and have each page render a Flash component for the body of that one page in order to get multiple pages that can be indexed under multiple URLs giving each their own <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, etc... but why go through all of that work just so the web designer can get his jollies from designing in Flash? Flash has its place on the web. I think it is fine to use if you don't want people to be able to find you in the search engines. It's fine to use to build small components to be rendered on web pages like ads. But complete sites are best built as HTML if you want your URLs to take advantage of on-page and on-site ranking factors considered by the search engines in their ranking algorithms.
I agree, flash is not going well with SEO. Html is the best way to go. However if you prefer to have flash use flash elements, maybe put flash heading or banner. That way your site would still be seo friendly. Ether way my suggestion is to redo the site, at the end this will save you time and $$$$
off page optimization is the best way to get top ranking for flash websites. you also create text content in alt tag and inform google about the contents.
Might want to check out that robots.txt there Dan... I get a 404 error when I request http://www.techcenter.uni.cc/robots.txt and get redirected to a variety of sites like http://sprinterweb.net/notify/1.php, http://phpnet.us/notify/1.php, http://ifastnet.com/notify/1.php, http://kwikphp.com/notify/1.php, etc. Each time I request your robots.txt I get a different site's /notify/1.php page. Hijacked maybe?