SEO is not just a hobby for me. It is also a much-needed online PR tool. My job is to promote business online and to be successful I need to employ various online channels.

The search engines are still the most important promotion tools. It is a fact: sites not listed in the search engines (organic results or sponsored results) miss out important traffic and revenue.

Unfortunately Flash websites have fewer chances to rank high naturally in the SERPs. While they look amazing and they provide for great interactive tools (when designed properly they even increase user experience being really entertaining) they are not search engines friendly and they raise enough accessibility issues to make online PR experts avoid recommending them to their clients. SEO for Flash is not an easy task. While some search engines (including Google) are able to crawl and “read” (more or less efficiently) text inserted in Flash animation (obviously if the test is not inserted as an image), many search engines aren’t. They crawl instead the html files that launch the Flash files (Flash animations are rooted in html codes).

I was often accused of being an “anti-Flash advocate”. I am not. I simply consider flash better for other purposes: interactive CDs (for company or product presentations and other branding purposes), eCards, games, banners, even animated headers… but not complete websites.

Sites created with Flash raise too many problems. They are more expensive; sometimes you’ll rely solely on links for SEO and on PPC and other paid tools for advertising. Compared to standard html pages the ROI is lower, the page structure is often poor, scannable internal linking is almost inexistent, the screen readers and the search engines are often unable to “read” them, and the cons list could go on.

So let’s focus on what you should do to create an optimized site.

Use all the ethical SEO tools possible to optimize the pages. Don’t ignore the META tags (title, description and keywords).

Make your site all browsers accessible and make sure that the html code that launches the Flash is W3C standards compliant.

Since 2004 already Macromedia has launched a tool called Flash Search Engine SDK (swf2html). This tool will convert swf to html automatically. Use it to see what the search engines see when they spider your flash page and start optimizing from there.

Avoid the EMBED tag which is not valid according to the W3C standards. Like it or not, these are the standards for an accessible website recommended even by Google (and other search engines).

You probably know that many sites built on frames use a tag called NOFRAMES to make the text content scannable. A similar tag was created for Flash sites: NOEMBED.

Create an html version of the Flash site, preferably one html version for each Flash page of the site and offer this as an alternative to your visitors and the search engines. Some recommend that you create html pages and include the Flash movies on each page together with the non-flash content. But this will lower the dramatic effect of the Flash, so you should use it solely if your overall website design allows it.

A very good tool is this JavaScript Flash Player detection and embed script. For XHTML websites this is better than the NOEMBED tag and W3C compliant.

Last but not least, the most important advice is: focus on branding. You’ll notice that powerful brands rank high even for all-Flash content. MTV ranks for “music” (this is not an all-Flash site, but it does have a short Flash intro that redirects you to another Flash driven page with some content), Starbucks ranks for coffee, Sony ranks for electronics, Ferrari for… Ferrari. These are brands, so powerful that they need no effort to rank high. Besides they rank for the relevant content and they don’t always focus on optimizing their pages for the SE, but for the users.