I stumbled on Flash SEO tool — an SEO tool for Flash sites that helps get your Flash site crawled by web spiders. The project will soon be available for download on Google Code http://code.google.com/p/flashseotool/.
Current features:
- HTML menus and submenus for web spiders
- Title, meta, keywords and description
- Friendly URLs
- Simple, automatic updates straight from your AS3 code
Features coming later:
- Generating a Google sitemap
- Deep linking integration support
- Integration with Delicious, Twitter and friends
- Generating RSS
How it works:
Google has actually been exploring how to index Flash sites for a long time, and it made progress early on (there’s an article http://googlechinablog.com/2008/07/flash.html). Google’s crawler can index content compiled into the SWF, but dynamically loaded text or images are still a pain. Flash SEO tool’s solution is to automatically generate a fully functional HTML counterpart to your Flash content. Flash SEO tool takes care of it without you writing a single line of server-side code.
The simplest way to update your SEO info with this tool is this — show the content to your users, and it updates itself. There’s an official example:
First, add some AS3 code to your site.
var seoSite:SeoSite = new SeoSite(“some/flash/section”);
seoSite.title = “Some title”;
seoSite.keywords = “Some, keywords, here”;
seoSite.description = “Provide some description too see it in google results.”;
seoSite.htmlContent = “Put content of the site here. You can use HTML tags here.”;
SeoTool.updateSite(seoSite);
Once the code is in place:
Create some new site content
Run the site in update mode (e.g. http://site.com/index.html?updateFlashSEO=myOwnUpdateKey)
Click through the links on your site and browse every subpage, and the database gets updated.
Then browse http://site.com/some/flash/section.html (that’s normal mode, so SeoTool.updateSite() in the code has no effect). The site you just optimized now shows content matching your Flash, and you can inspect it with http://site.com/some/flash/section.html?noflash.
Heh, looks good. Once it’s downloadable I’ll try it out on my own site.
For more on Flash and SEO issues and discussion, you can also check out this site http://www.flashnseo.com/ and http://www.flashseo.com/.
[Addendum]: Its SEO approach is actually similar to my personal site. After looking at their site, I added a noflash parameter to my own site too: http://www.mousebomb.org/2009/?noflash. Either way, the static HTML content is visible to search engines, while people who open the page without the parameter see the Flash.