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6 different web designers have asked me about making Flash SEO friendly in the last month, so I'll post some tips here.

Most SEOs would agree that Flash is not really SEO friendly (yet). This is because all the content (text) is inside the flash movie and the spiders can't read it or at least usually chooses not to index that content. Supposedly SEs can index some content embedded in Flash but I have not seen any sites banking on this theory successfully.

There is a pretty good alternative (I hate to use the word trick) that has been going around the SEO circles for while. This solution is to use the SWFObject script.

This script allows for a div section named "flashcontent". Anything placed inside this div will not be shown to the user but your Flash movie will show up as usual. The idea is to place plain text content and/or links inside this div as spider food.

An added bonus of using this script is it gets rid of the "white lines" shown around a Flash movie before the "control" is activated in IE by clicking on the Flash object.

In other SEO friendly Flash related news, another designer emailed me a link to fCMSPro which claims to be an SEO friendly Flash based content management system(CMS). I took a look at their product and while it has made some advances in terms of more SEO friendly flash, it also has some serious drawbacks (IMHO).

The way it works I assume is by passing in a variable to the flash script to tell it which content to load. I assume it gets the various URLs with the variables attached indexed by creating a sitemap somewhere linking to each one.

Certainly if you had to use a Flash CMS for some reason (that I can't think of), you'd probably want to use this one. Take that lightly because I have never even seen another Flash based CMS out there.

Have Fun Flashing

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Mike 'The Internet Guy' Belasco owns and operates a search engine optimization company in Denver, Colorado. Mike specializes in search engine marketing for small businesses. You can read more content from Mike on his blog which can be found at http://www.miketheinternetguy.com/blog.