A fashionable tool in the hands of the web designers to deliver eye-catching and user-friendly websites for visitors, Flash is widely used and appreciated - but only by the web designers and visitors. While users enjoy surfing through flash-enhanced sites, the search engines fail to reward their usefulness appropriately. Nevertheless, Google is one exception to the rule among search engines that ranks flash pages. In other words, Google provides web designers the scope to optimize flash pages so as to appear higher in Google’s Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP).
To optimize a flash page, you need to find the relevant flash content in Google’s SERP. This can be achieved by specifying a topic within quotes followed by the filetype operator and file extension, like “web development” filetype:SWF, as a search term. Thus, you will find a listing of exclusively Macromedia flash files with [FLASH] description posted beside.
With flash search results relevant to your subject, you can utilize a free of cost available application from Macromedia or Adobe, called the Flash Search Engine Software Development Kit (SDK), as the next measure. The software basically helps you know the Flash content that Google extracts and uses to index flash pages. Understanding Google’s tendencies, in advance, assist you in improvising your own flash pages for higher ranking. The SDK software for Windows and Linux is available for ready download at Macromedia Player Licensing page.
The SDK software includes an application called swf2html, which extracts the text and the links from Macromedia Flash SWF file in question, and outputs it into a HTML document. The swf2html application is offered as a static library for linked library implementation. The application is run on the DOS prompt by using the various related command-line options in conjunction, to generate the extractable text in desired format.
Upon scrutiny of dug out text that Google considers for ranking any flash based web page, you will gather that Google does not look at the flash content as it appears in the SWF file. Instead it pays attention to the textual information attached to the graphical representations. For example, if the web page has three buttons viz. Links, Contact Us and Sign Out, on the page, the extraction will include the rollover text for the three buttons. So it is only logical to label them more meaningfully and descriptively. For example, if the target keyword is “Dynamic Web Designing”, the rollover button may read “Dynamic Web Designing Options” for Link. Further, as Google uses the first text in the SWF as the title of the search result, it is only advisable to have a meaningfully descriptive title at the top of the SWF page.
And finally, Google’s Spam filters penalize anything that is repeated over and over again – be it text or be it graphics. Therefore, keywords or the text representing the theme of the website must be used only at the prominent places, rather than everywhere. With SDK software, you can conclude the flash content that must have keywords.
