Making Flash Search Engine Friendly

With the introduction of Flash, many web designers now have an incredibly flexible tool to integrate sound, motion, and text.  Used correctly, Flash can really elevate the user experience far above what regular text and graphics can provide.

In one of my first posts, How do Search Engines View Your Site?, I spoke about how I removed the Flash from a client's home page to allow the Search Engines (SE) to crawl inside the site and index the content.  One of the readers of the post, Thierry de Baillon, correctly pointed out that that I could have used an HTML tag to link the SE into the site.  (You may want to read through the comments for that post to see what other reasons I had in removing the Flash animation.)

Before I get into the use of this HTML tag, I do want to correct a common misconception.  Search Engines can index a Flash web site.  Macromedia, the developer of Flash, has released a Software Developer's Kit (SDK) that provides all the functions required to make the Flash animation readable to SE.  Google can spider and index Flash sites right now.

So where is the problem? Many Flash implementations, especially web sites developed entirely in Flash, are made up of one single file.  There is no way for the SE to interpret the individual pages of the web site. 

Right now the ideal solution is a mix of Flash and HTML.  By embedding the Flash into a regular HTML web page, you can have the user experience you desire and have the content available to the SE.

For those of you who have a web page made entirely of Flash, like the introductory splash pages, here is how you can get the SE to bypass the animation and get into your site.  Embed the Flash inside an HTML document and include the <noembed> tag.  This <noembed> tag should come immediately after the <embed> tag and can include HTML, so it is ideal to include some text that describes the Flash animation and a link to the real home page of the web site. 

Pro Tip: The <noembed> tag is traditionally used to display a message if the web visitor does not have a suitable player installed. Otherwise it is ignored by the browser.