Increasing Search Engine Visibility For Flash Content
Online searches driven by keywords get their results from spidering text in pages’ html scripts. Completely graphics driven web pages, like pure Flash or Rich Internet Applications with Adobe’s Flex or Microsoft’s Silverlight, are invisible to search engine scans. Here’s a way to quickly and easily add searchable content.
Spidering html scripts is relatively easily to do, while extracting organized content from image and swf files won’t happen any time soon. Nothing beats the specificity of words to focus on items of interest. It’s still too difficult to extract meaning from arbitrary arrays that mainly constitute image files, and rich internet applications are more or less made of parameterized calls to a run time library.
But searchable text can be added to these pages without their being rendered to clutter up visitor views. Simple put the text content in a DIV section that has its display style set to ‘none;’. This can be done explicitly, as in
<div id=’someid’ style=’display:none;’>
…searchable.content.here…
</div>
or included in a cascading style sheet like
.riacontent { display:none; }
that is then included in the DIV section like this:
<div class=’riacontent’ id=’someid’>
…searchable.content.here…
</div>
This makes the searchable content hidden from the visitor’s view of the rich internet page, but exposes the content to the search spiders. The technique relies on the fact that search spiders don’t stray from ‘regular’ content in html, nor do they try to interpret external directives such as css and javascript, particularly when they are contained in separate files.
Doing this is easily tested. Add the html page containing the rich internet application to the site’s sitemap.xml file and let it run for a month or so, enough time for the search engines to examine and index it, although there won’t be much there other than the web page’s header section. Then, add the searchable content wrapped in the DIV section as noted above, and after a month look at the number of search scans on the content, which will be significantly higher than initially.
We’ve done this testing for all of our Flash/Flex presentations, which we’re using more and more without losing any search visibility.
© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: Flash, flex, ria, rich internet applications, search engine visability, seo, web spidering