Thursday, July 17, 2008

Designing Flash Pages for Google

Flash is very popular tool for designing and producing the highly interactive and multimedia websites. It is believed that the pages that are created in the Flash can’t get index quickly and they can’t be ranked well because the search engine spiders are unable to read the contents of Flash. Flash pages contains little or not text that the crawlers look for on a website.

With the innovation of the latest technology and tool it is now possible to get ranking for the Flash pages. This remarkable discovery still has been unnoticed to the big SEO community. In this article you will learn that how to Flash website get indexed and ranked in Google. To see the Flash web pages in Google you can use the following command.

"Web design" filetype: SWF

With this command you will find a lot of the results that returns the Flash website. It shows that Google is indexing the Flash websites.

Flash Search Engine SDK

Macromedia has a Flash Search Engine SDK (Software development Kit) that is what we are looking for. SKD is freely downloadable for the Windows and MAC operating systems. SDK includes an application named `swf2html'. It extracts the text and the links from the Macromedia Flash File .swf and returns the data as an html page. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application.

For the detailed understanding and functionalities please see the readme.htm file in the SDK. In the Windows based operating systems, Swf2html is executed on the command prompt and you can use number of commands to extract the data from the .swf file in any form mainly in the .html.

How to use swf2html

When you download and install the SDK, it will automatically install the several folders and the files on your computer including an executable swf2html and a sample .swf file. You need to place the swf2html and .swf file in the same folder. Now perform the following actions.

  • Start > run and type cmd
  • At the command prompt type swf2html flashfile.SWF -o outputfilename.html (You need to provide the name of the resulting (output file)
  • Google can read the resulting .html file including all the links and text on it.
  • After getting the resulting file, you can change the text according to your choice.
  • Make the first line of the text more descriptive and meaningful as Google will take it as the title.
  • You can get an idea of what Google indexes from the Flash pages from the already .swf indexed pages of the Google.
  • Don’t repeat the same words excessively on the resulting Flash pages. As it can penalize your website.

The following type of the animation can cause the duplication effects.

  • Movie clips with the multiple copies of the symbol.
  • Animations that require the duplicate copies of the text in a movie clip.
  • Animations that involves converting the text into the symbol and then manipulating the single instance of the symbol.

Conclusion

It’s great news for the web designers and the SEO experts that Google is now indexing the Flash pages. But a great care is required while manipulating the resulting (output file) and ensure that it does not contain the repeating words many times. You can change the same words with the other words to avoid the duplications.

(source: http://www.theitlibrary.com/flash/designing-flash-pages.html)



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