How can I Get My Flash Website Ranked High in Google?

Hi mikesandra,

Google indexes text-based Flash (Flash where the text is text, not images of text) just about like any other document, so if your content is relevant it will come up on Google searches.  The key here is to have a real good intro text on the Flash so Google can index that...I'm not at all sure how deep they go on a Flash based site.  Better yet is to have an intro page that launches into the Flash (or offers a non-Flash version of the site) and that will really give Google some meat to chew.

If you want a pure Flash site, you should have the meta description tag on the page containing the Flash movie for additional Google-bait.  Rouchie is more or less correct about keywords not mattering, but I recommend not using them as they can do harm (keyword spamming) and very little good.  He is also correct that the only way to climb the mountain without paying is to get a good Page Rank and that is not entirely in your control.

Kitezh is correct about paying for AdWords placement and that can go a long way to establish your presence quickly.  In the long run, you want a better page rank and the only way to get it is to convince other people to link to you.

There is so much you can do with all the hacks, but it is whole lot better if you can actually provide the one all the search engine spiders can understand...  I'd say create a static HTML page that search engine spider can crawl through instead of the Flash site...  That's the only way you can go to make sure all other search engines can recognize your site because Google is pretty much the only one who can understand SWF better...  Hopefully it will get better soon...

CyanBlue

Even though I have a flash website the very first page is html ofcourse.  The html page holds the flash website.  Is that what you mean or do you mean have just a totally html page with absolutely no flash as my first page.

Ok your website  uses HTML on the homepage. What Rouchie and Cyan were trying to explain were Metatags. Metatags are HTML tags that are written into the head section of an HTML page and convey different kinds of information, but don't actually show on the page as text. For example the title, description and keywords for the page. Some search engines use metatags to index pages.

So basically they act like tags that are referred to by search engines. You want to have as many keywords as pssible usually 50 at the least and 150 is a good start. You can also tag your flash images AFAIK so they are tagged also.

http://agnitionetworks.com/content/faq.htm#faq7 - some useful FAQ's to explain meta tags
http://www.searchengineguide.com/thackston/2003/1023_kt1.html

So even though all your pages on your website contain flash iamges the framework is probably based on HTML so just place your tags whatever they be on these <-the more the merrier :)

I already had metatags

Well if thats the case and you really want your site up on ggole results there I would advise using
http://www.google.ie/ads/ and start exchanging links. Also look at your website content and look at way in which you can add or change this to drive more and more traffic to it but also to keep people coming back to it.

Cloak your site...

Serve anyone accessing via google IP a website filled with text and a normal user the flash content.

If you want any examples i'll be obliged to give you some.

Playing games with the Google cloaking can have adverse side effects...

What about the SWFObject. Has anyone had any luck with using that? I am using that one a few of my sites but not sure if it is helping at all.


http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

SWFObject is simply a tool to place Flash into a page and avoid Internet Explorer's "Click Here to Activate" message

Are you sure about that?


The Flash SEO method uses a DIV with search-engine-accessible, primary content, and a Javascript function called SWFObject() to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. When an appropriate version of Flash player is present, the Javascript manipulates the page's document object model (DOM) to replace the primary content with the Flash movie.

Most search engine spiders can't handle Flash, so they will elect to view the primary content. The primary content may contain links, headings, styled text, imagesanything we can add to an ordinary HTML page.

>> When an appropriate version of Flash player is present, the Javascript manipulates the page's document

Yes, but the page content is then determined through Javascript, which google won't like either because it's not flat HMTL but manipulated code intermingled with contextual information.  Ideally you would need Flash pages, then alternative pages with plain HTML.

DHTML is getting good enough now to replace Flash functionality anyway, in most cases.  A lot of people just settle for Flash banners which don't need to be seen by Google anyway because they don't affect the page content and are for presentation only.

Besides Poodle Predictor - http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/about_poodle.html - Do you know of any other way  to see what Google sees as far as page structure and content?

As far as I know Google strips all formatting apart from the most basic header and paragraph tags.  I use the WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox as it has an option to remove all styles from the page.