Flash™ movies are a popular way to make websites more compelling. Unfortunately, if you use Flash™ movies, or if you design your entire website using Flash™ technology, your odds of getting listed in search engines are greatly reduced.
This is because search engines can only "see" pure text — meaning they're unable to recognize text that appears as a graphic in a Flash™ movie.
Not to worry: The following tips can help you get your Flash™ contents indexed by the search engines:
Provide links to alternate pages that contain a lot of text and some keywords that the search engines can index.
Place some text above and below your Flash™ movie that contains your keywords. Along with your title and maybe your meta tags, this gives search engines some contents to index.
If you embed the Flash™ movie in your HTML code, use your most important keywords in the movie filename using the HTML tags <param name="movie" value="movie-filename.swf"> and <param name="src" value="movie-filename.swf>.
You can use the <object standby="message you want to display while the video loads"> attribute to include some text that is displayed while the Flash™ movie is being loaded. In addition, you can use the <object title="movie title"> attribute to include a keyword-rich movie title.
Use the <noembed> tag to provide text for Web browsers that don't support the Flash™ plug-in. This text should describe the contents of the Flash™ movie, as search engines can index that description.
Link from other pages of your website to your Flash™ page with a keyword-rich link text.
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