Flash and SEO, Will This Work?

There's a site I'm supposed to be doing SEO on.

On some pages they have a flash "problem solver," where you click on the problem you're having and see the solution. (I have both the .fla and the .swf)

They've put a ton of work into their problem solver flash video, so here was my idea.

1. Take a screenshot of each problem/solution, and make a page for it.
2. Convert to a jpg, and optimize the image.
3. Add a bit of keyword optimized text below it, and take care of the titles, meta tags, and URLs, so they are perfectly optimized.

The idea was perfect. I could mass produce it quite easily. The one problem.

Their is a color gradient in their background that doesn't match up with the screenshot. (The image has a ton of texts/images in it, so it would be a headache to change the background on every single image) So they want me to find another solution.

Would it be possible to put the flash video in the page, and then put SEO optimized text below it. Flash is really not my strong point.

Would that work SEO wise?


Any advice or alternative solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a ton. ~englandrm

this is BHW so I would recommend the cloaking method or simply optimize in between the <noscript> tags

You could embed the Flash portion in an iFrame, then you would be free to do whatever you wanted with the page, but that little portion would just perform as a movie (it could even be served up from another server if necessary). I have implemented this successfully for several clients.

I wouldn't make a whole page (or G-d forbid a whole site) out of Flash, though, because as you probably know, Flash can degrade over time, and then Google sees it as malware and can red-flag the site, and that's no good.

Do you think it would be easier to get a page that has flash on it, or an iframe with the flash in it ranked?

Off the top of my head I would say iFrame, but you would have to A/B test to know for sure. What platform is the whole site on? Is it straight html, or is it a Wordpress site, or what? Can you maybe get them to put the Flash piece on a totally different site (or sub-domain) than the main one you're trying to rank?

It's a straight html site, but they use flash in the header, in certain spots on the sidebar, and on some pages in the content.

Each page is ranking for a very specific keyword. Most are 2-3 words long, plus a location. Aka very low competition, but in their direct market.

you dont need to insert iFrame. As you said, its pure HTML website right? so you can just insert whole flash on that specific page and put all your optimized content below that. Its harder to optimize websites which are built 100% in flash. In your case, its just a flash movie and flash header. So, just do what you'd do usually : )

You should get an XML driven version of the flash, like the many sold by CodeCanyon I think or flashden or whichever Company does it. That way, the text in the xml portion will be indexed, as bigG and others will not have a hardtime knowing what the page is about.

There are complete websites that are only flash and are xml driven. You mentioned that you are not strong at flash, but you may hire a freelancer to do the programming so the flash respond to the data in xml and the xml will be your SEO part.

I'm just saying...

i think Google can read words in flash if they are not created as graphics. I made a flash banner with some details back in 2008 and the information in it was indexed as some of it was even displayed in the small snippet after the title.... i hope it is still the case