Why Optimize Your Flash Images & Movies For The Search Engines?
When Flash was first introduced, Google and other search engines had a hard time reading it. Today, they are reading flash information fine, as long as the image has certain parameters inserted in the code. This is to help the search engines read the image or movie. Without these parameters, the search engine will not understand what the movie is about. This is not very good, for if you have a lot of flash on your site, it may get missed altogether by the search engines. On the positive side, if they are all named properly using the methods below, it will help add more focused content to your site.
How to Optimize Flash For Search Engines!
When creating flash images or movies, it is important to name them according to the actual image. Whenever possible, try to name them using keywords that you are targeting.
Search Engines are now indexing Flash much better than before and it can be used to your benefit. All the flash images currently do not have 'Title' tags that name the image to the search engine. Just as an ALT TAG works with regular images, you should have a keyword description for every Flash image.
You can use the <object title="your movie title"> attribute to include a keyword-rich movie title.
In addition, you can use the <object standby="your message to show while loading"> attribute to include some text that is displayed while the Flash movie is being loaded.
Use the <noembed> </noembed> tag to provide text for web browsers which don't support the Flash plugin. Use it to describe the contents of the Flash movie as search engines can index that description. Ensure to make it a keyword rich title for the movie.
Watch Out For Search Engine Spam!
* NOTE: You should only optimize the real images that are larger than 10X10 pixels. If you optimize all the images, including very tiny ones, Google may think you are trying to spam the tags. This will only hurt your rankings on Google, rather than help it.
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