How to Get FLASH Indexed in Search Engines

by Robin Nobles

Note: The example portions of this article have been removed. However, you can view article in its entirety at: http://www.academywebspecialists.com/newsletters/0702.html

Perhaps you can relate to involuntary groan elicited by search engine optimizers when a client presents an expensive new Web site featuring high quality FLASH movie content.

Of course, client (or maybe your boss?) is thrilled with dazzling presentation, and they rarely fail to mention what a "small fortune" it cost to produce before adding "it's worth it!...don't you agree? All it needs now is for YOU to optimize it for findability in search engines."

Isn't it funny? ... how they fail to notice color rushing to your face as you suppress urge to scream and opt instead for tactful approach, patiently explaining (once again) that FLASH doesn't score well in search engines.

Don't panic -- there IS a solution!

Here's a solution you can use to get best of both worlds - search engine findability and professional image enhancement that FLASH can provide.

The strategy involves using an absolute positioning technique called Z Order within your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). For this to make sense, you must first understand what Z Order is. Microsoft's MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com) site explains...

The Z order of a window indicates window's position in a stack of overlapping windows. This window stack is oriented along an imaginary axis, z-axis, extending outward from screen. The window at top of Z order overlaps all other windows. The window at bottom of Z order is overlapped by all other windows.

In non-technogeekspeak, Z Order allows you to place content partially, or even fully, on top of other content. Since only content on top is viewable, it's entirely possible to place an unintelligible-to-search-engines FLASH movie on top of an easy- to-index-layer of relevant text content. And, by doing so, your site visitor sees only FLASH movie while engine sees only your relevant keyword-laden text.

How to create Z Order using CSS

To accomplish magic it's helpful to first understand what a very basic CSS using Z Order source code might look like. To view basic example, visit complete article online at: http://www.academywebspecialists.com/newsletters/0702.html

Source of example: http://www.htmlref.com/examples/Fig10- 14.htm

Notice that highest value --

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, seven of top search engines process over 300 million searches a day! Additionally, Search Engine Watch documents an item called GVU Survey Results from Georgia Institute of Technology which shows that 85% of all web users admit to regularly using search engines to find web sites they visit.

The truth is, if you are seeking sales at your website, then you should be looking for traffic too. While sales is your true goal, no sales can take place until traffic occurs.

A lot of people scream to high heavens that search engines do not work. The fact is that search engines do work. It is just that people who are shouting do not understand how to make search engines work for them.

We will not go into great detail right now about how to make search engines work for you. We will only touch on differences between search engines of which there are three types: Pay-Per-Clicks, Directories and Spiders.

Pay-Per-Clicks require that you open cash accounts with them before you will be listed. While there are often ways to get into PPCSE's without opening an account, we will not discuss that here.

Directories limit your submissions to page title, link and a short description.

For this discussion, we will be speaking about Spider Search Engines. Spiders are in fact software that visits your site and gathers data from your website to determine how to tell people about your website.

While some Spiders gather a limited number of words from each website, others gather all of words listed within your website. This is where we come to our point today.

Spiders gather data from your site to provide a title and description for your readers. Additionally, Spiders gather words from your website and rank those words to determine which sites to return to their users.

The words they gather from your website are referred to as keywords. Search engine keywords exclude pronouns, prepositions and other very common words. All others provide rich fodder to Spiders.