5 easy ways to boost your Flash site’s SEO

How to ensure your project gets indexed by the search engines

Our colleagues over on Computer Arts, experts in creating digital art and illustrations, have tackled a popular web design myth: that Flash is SEO unfriendly.

It’s perfectly possible to get your Flash site indexed by Google, Computer Arts explains, and so they’ve come up with 10 useful strategies to get your site ranked.

Here are five of the tips that caught our eye…

1. Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

2. Add SWF content to the HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWFObject to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

3. Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

4. Embed Flash content with SWFObject

SWFObje movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without ct is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the FlashFlash will still see a working HTML page.

5. Try using sIFR

Use Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) for HTML pages with SEO-friendly embedded Flash fonts. Simply create an HTML page, add CSS and create a SWF file containing your custom font. Link the font SWF to the HTML and then mark up live text headings in the HTML, using sIFR to display a custom font that’s easily read by search engines. Find out more, including documentation and tips for using sIFR

Few Steps of Good Web Designing

Web designing is the process that enables the corporate and SMEs to streamline their business profits and also it offers an ideal global platform to make known about the services to the world.

There is a remarkable difference between a website and a good website. A website that gives cool and refreshing looks is a profit churner as it helps in yielding profits and attracting quality traffic that can transform into prospective clients later in the course of time.

6 Steps for Good Web Designing

* The Need for a Good Web Design – A good web designing concept is required to get more leads and more sales. Moreover, the website designed be search engine friendly so that it can be easily tracked by the crawlers. Yes, of course, a good web design will answer your business queries strategically.

* Spotting the Right Audience Base – A good web design should embark on the criterion of who the potential audience would be, and will the audience calls be answered.

* A Planned Architecture – Create a well-planned and structured site map. The site map is the cockpit that will give a thumbnail view over the website to the visitor. There should be a wire frame view that will show where the content for each page will go.

* Begin by creating Web Design Templates – To design a good website, it is essential that you make website templates in order to get first hand feel of how drop down menus will function; how information requests will be called etc. Go for rigorous tests with all the functionality and events in order to make them completely user-friendly.

* Add Content – A good web design stands no where without crisp content. An easily understandable content with no typos is the heart and soul of a good website. It gives the right and timed information to the visitors about the products and services.

* Keep the Look and Feel Simple – A simple and logical moving content elements brings all the grace to a website. Too much of snazziest contents simply disorient the interest of an average user.

These points lend a good website design strategy and one must always keep the potential audience in mind while designing the website.

Guidelines for Web Design with SEO Advantage

Designing a user friendly site is very important. This could be achieved by integrating good navigation of web pages. User should easily locate link and hyper links of sites so that he/she could go through inner pages of the site. Each pages linked to menu items should be exactly matching menu title. Home page should be linked to each and every page so that user can access home page easily and where as be possible link all pages from one another, Provide appropriate link and title within pages while referring to information.

To begin with browsers – Check your design in different browsers and fix all incompatibility issues. Set most commonly used screen resolution and check whether site display is fine. Make appropriate changes if needed. Try to use web safe colors. Integrate plug-in in pages very carefully. Try to use plug-in which are compatible with all browsers. Avoid using plug-in which are frequently updated.

In order to make your site search engine friendly interlinking of pages is very important. Make sure that each page of your site is interlinked with other pages. Put text links with appropriate keywords for your site. If you are putting image link than do not forget to put alter text keywords. Put appropriate Meta keywords and description. Avoid using JavaScript and flash as they are bad for search engines usability. After all visitors are most important asset for your site and you want as many visitors as possible. These are few basic guidelines to follow before you start with your design.

Platform compatibility of the design should be checked. Make sure it is cross platform compatible. Browser compatibility, Screen resolution, Color depth and plug-ins are to be considered for making cross platform design.