Hello All, A company I work for is wanting to improve their search engine rankings. The site is establish..Domain is a good 3-4 years old..has a PR5 with PR4 inner pages..The only problem is, the website is done partially in flash. The menu is done in flash, but the pages themselves are done in PHP I'm curious what are some of the best tips and tricks for optimizing a site that is done in flash? Here are a few ideas I have.. *Link exchanges (always a must for seo) *More inner pages with keyword rich text and thats where i'm stumped. Anyone have some other good suggestions for optimizing a flash based website?
It's partial, meaning you can do normal optimization methods like placing alt tags and some content. And off-page optimization of course.
That's ok, your navigation isn't Flash which is the biggest problem if it was. All you need to do is ensure any text contained within the flash file is replicated on the page as plain text. Also you can do a browser detect and serve a non-flash version to any agent that isn't Flash enabled using a mixture of jpg or gif images with Alt attribute for looks, and plain text for message content. Just make sure your non-flash version has the same textual content as the flash file as it will be served to spiders, don't go trying to jam keywords in there in attempt to inflate rankings and you will be fine. Edit: I'd be inclined to worry about/fix your duplicate Titles & Descriptions first, this is letting you down way more then your Flash file. See Here
thanks so much for the tips sweetfunny. I left you some green rep for your excellent help. any idea where I can find some sort of tutorial on how to create the browser agent? Also, how exactly would that work? Would I have two indexes and what not?? Thanks again if anyone else can give some pointers I would really appriciate it
There's a few ways you can display the alternate content (pulling it via an include in to the current page, alternate page display etc), it's just a matter of working out what's best for you. I'd pull the content in to the Flash area instead of making new URL's, anyway Flash detection is just some Javascript.. Have a read of http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/fp8_detection.html Your Flash isn't letting your SEO down that much, it's mainly when your page is predominately Flash it's good to look at Flash detection. You could easily get away with replicating the text from your Flash as plain text towards the bottom of your page somewhere. As i mentioned, i'd get those Titles & Descriptions fixed up first, the improvement will provide more "bang for your buck" then the Flash modification.
Sounds good sweetfunny. Maybe I will hold off on that and work on changing the titles/descriptions and adding more php pages. I'm sure a sitemap would hurt too much either
Do you mean the whole website is made of Flash? or there are just some pages of the site in which Flash is embedded?
First of all make sure you have a sitemap to ensure that all the pages are found by the SE spiders. A human html sitemap accessible from the main page would be great especially if most of your link building point to the home page. Second websites built in flash will rely more heavily on their link popularity. So you know what to do...
thanks for the responses everyone. Devat, site url is posted above but here it is again. princess.donna = the main layout is done in flash but all inner pages..etc are done in php. seo4china, we have a sitemap and I will certainly be updating it. thanks for the pointers guys! Always welcoming more suggestions and tips from you pros