It is a very popular notion that SEO is not flash friendly. But this is just a myth. All one needs to do is create accessible flash content for search engines. This ensures that you preserve your presence on the web and also get traffic on your site. These Flash Optimization Tips will be helpful for making the most out of major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source is very important
A sure shot way is to extract SWF’s content and place it in the HTML source. This helps the search engines to pick up the page and rank it on the search engine. Dreamweaver and other such tools embed flash using SWF Objects. Dreamweaver’s code view lists comments where one should add the alternative HTML content.

Maintain a unique URL
A site that is just one big chunk of Flash in an HTML template, its pages are never going to refresh. Having a different URL for each page of a site’s Flash content is the way to go. Each page should have its own HTML source title ‘H1’ and body copy should contain the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping
A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) cannot be made SEO enhanced by simply adding the content into the HTML source of the page for each section of the Flash application. This practice doesn’t establish any prominence of content, owing to the number of competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives
Adobe is collaborating with Google and Yahoo! towards making the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will allow the search engines to check what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, this process is still developing and so cannot be counted as a step for optimizing your project for SEO.

Adding text to Flash applications
A simple way of Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in the flash movie. This is a better option than using text that’s a flattened bitmap. The Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help generate traffic. Also this text should be used in the HTML source of the page.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups
There are a number of sites that ask to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This diminishes all the chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. Not only are the search spiders unable to see them, pop-ups also suffer as they are blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help
At the root of a server, you get a plain text file named Robots.txt. This directs the robots towards the content which is to be allowed and tells them which content is disallowed. If a sites Flash text content is the same as the HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search robots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object
Integrating SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. First produce alternative (non-Flash) content, and then create snippets of JavaScript which should swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash can view the HTML page.