Partitioning Flex For Search Engine Optimization
Easily scanned and parsed Text in web pages remains the raw material for search engine processing. Flex, Flash and images don’t lend themselves to that ease of analysis, and are largely ignored for finding ‘relevance’. Some simple planning and strategic location can make Flex applications get the full benefits of current SEO scans.
The search engine scanning, processing and ranking, dominated by google, has always seemed somewhat gamey, with the rules continually changing and in any event never completely disclosed. This is the way it has to be, otherwise someone somewhere will stumble on the secret sauce’s recipe, and dominate the results. The google slaps have to shake things up to prevent this.
It’s far easier to abstract relevance and context from text than by having to deconstruct proprietary asset formats (e.g., swf files) that are subject to change without notice, not to mention version differences. As a practical matter, declaring applicable seo content within these files presents additional challenges, not least the total lack of standards that otherwise could make it easier.
It is possible to have seo scannable content within a Flex application, but doing so takes a bit of work to avoid having parallel and independent content systems, and generally not something that many would undertake.
A much better way is to partition the Flex application into smaller chunks that are distributed throughout the text stream. The Flex pieces would be relatively small, generally imbedded in a div section, and provide the interactive eye candy that augments the text, consisting as always of headers over content blocks.
This approach results in far easier maintenance as the messages are fine tuned to the changing keyword cloud that coalesces around the web site.
Tags: Flash, flex, seo, swf files search engine optimization