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How To Use Flash In Your Site And Still Be Search Engine Friendly
by: George Peirson
Do you want to have a feature rich web site with animations, sound, and an opening splash screen?

Do you want to use Flash extensively on your site but you are afraid of hurting your search engine positioning?

Do you require an opening splash page but were told that the search engines could not index your site if you had one?

Well there are ways to have the benefits of Flash on your site and still be attractive to search engines. It is all in how the Flash is used. Some of the methods are simple while others require more programming experience. But we all can use Flash without driving away the search engines.

First let’s look at the problem. Search engines index a site by looking at the content. In this case we are talking about text content, not pictures, video, sound, or animation. A basic rule of thumb on having a very search engine friendly site is to have high quality, targeted content in text form and limiting the use of anything that can get in the way of the search engines analyzing this content.

But what about Flash? Flash converts everything into a Flash file, or SWF file playable by the Flash Player plug-in. All the text in this Flash file will be converted from text to vector graphics, and since the search engines cannot read text in a graphic, they will be unable to read the text in a Flash file. Therefore they will be unable to index the information in the site.

So how to we get around this seemingly insurmountable problem? It is all in how we use Flash in our site. The trick is to either wrap the Flash inside normal html coding, or by using xhtml you can have Flash display text from an external source. I will limit this article to the easier methods for using Flash in a search engine friendly manner.

Let’s look at the three main ways we may want to use Flash on a website:

1. Splash Page
2. Flash navigation
3. Flash content

Starting with the Flash Splash page there are a couple of ways to handle this. If we just have the Flash Splash page as the opening page to our web site there will be no way aside from the meta tags for the search engines to index the page, let alone find any more pages in your site.

The trick here is to give the search engines something to work with. This can be easily done in two ways. You can put a text only navigation bar just below the splash screen, this way the search engines can at least find the other pages in your site. But to allow the search engines to index the actual splash screen here is a neat trick. Place the Flash file in a layer, you can then float that layer over the web page allowing you to hide all the plain html text you want underneath the Flash layer. This has the added benefit of giving content to visitors who do not have the Flash player installed on their system.

With a Flash navigation bar things are much easier. As long as only the navigation is in Flash the rest of the page can use search engine friendly text, plus you can put a text only navigation bar across the bottom of the page so that the search engines can find the rest of your pages. This is a good idea anyway and one that I always follow. Plus when a visitor reaches the bottom of your page they have some links to follow without having to scroll back up the page to your navigation bar.

Using Flash content in your web site follows the basic principles outlined above. As long as you have some text based content for the search engines to index you will be OK. I have found that having Flash animation on the top of my page where it fills the screen, followed by additional text is a nice hybrid approach. It gives your visitors the content rich experience you want to provide plus gives the search engines all the text based content they need for proper search engine indexing.

If you really want or need a complete Flash site there is one more thing you can do. This requires more work, but it will keep your site in the search engines. Create two versions of your web site, one in Flash and one using regular HTML. Have a simple home page that allows visitors to select either the Flash or HTML version of your site. Include on this home page your main keywords and navigation links to at least your site map and main pages so that the search engines can find their way around your site. This gives you the best of both worlds, the fully feature rich Flash site, and a search engine friendly HTML web site.

One final note, Google now is able to index Flash files, pulling out the text content from the SWF files. This is a great advance and allows us to use Flash more freely on our web sites, but note that they are pulling the TEXT out of the Flash file. So in order to make your Flash files Google friendly you need to include your search engine optimized text as text inside the Flash file, just like you would in a regular html web page.

So with proper planning and a few tricks we can have a very rich Flash site and still benefit from easy search engine indexing.

About the author:
George Peirson a professional software trainer and consultant. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. To see training sets and other articles by George Peirson visit http://www.howtogurus.com
Article copyright 2005 George Peirson


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How Video can be used Effectively Online

A powerful way to convey your communication messages to your audience is to be able to have your promotional video available on your website.

Yet, we have probably all experienced visiting a website and clicking on a video only to have to been irritated that the content is not viewable or that the sound is inaudible. The result is we leave the website in frustration.

So how do you make sure the video content on your website can be watched by your audience? It all boils down to how you want your viewers to access your video file and the level of video quality you want your movie to be played at.

There are two different ways of sharing your video file on the web:

1. Streamable Video

This is where the viewer is able to download sections of your video (otherwise known as "streaming"), while the video is playing. The main benefit of this method is that the user does not have to spend time downloading the complete video before viewing.

There are three major streaming video formats ? RealVideo (RM), QuickTime (MOV) and Windows Media (WMV). These are playable on Real Player, QuickTime Player and Windows Media Player respectively. Windows Media Player is widely available on most PC's, as it is part of Windows Operating System. The other players need to be installed.

The only negative with streamable video is that the quality of the video is dependent upon Internet connection. In addition, it has the annoying habit of dropping video frames because the streaming software has to adjust the data rate based on the speed of your Internet connection, in order to keep playing the video.

2. Download and Play

This is where the viewer needs to download the entire video first, then play it on their video player application. The main advantage is that the video quality is not affected by Internet connection speed.

However, it can take some time for the video to download if the file is large.

So which format do you choose?

In a world where first impressions always count, it is extremely important for companies to appear professional and trustworthy at all times. Marketing videos with poor picture quality are likely to reflect a poor quality company in the mind of the viewer. Consequently, we always recommend the download and play option. This is because it allows for high quality video content to be viewed.

However, as you don't want viewers to give up on downloading your video, we only recommend that short video clips are inserted onto your website.

This means your website users will be able to download a short video at a high quality picture resolution that will portray your company in the best possible way.

(c) Marie-Claire Ross 2004. All rights reserved.

Marie-Claire Ross is one of the partners of Digicast. Digicast works with organisations who are not satisfied that their marketing and training materials are helping their business grow. She can be contacted on 0500 800 234 (Australia wide) or at mc@digicast.com.au. The website is at http://www.digicast.com.au.

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