About Indexing flash and frames in search engines

[Jaymin Kansara]

Hello i am jaymin from india,

can anybody tell me how to get index flash files and frames through search engines?

[tedster]

Hello Jaymin and welcome to the forums.

As you probably know, optimizing a Flash page for SEO can be a big challenge. Especially for a highly competitive keyword, it can seem almost impossible. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything, or see some good results for not-quite-so competitive keywords.

The first and easiest thing is to work with what you DO have. Title tags, meta descriptions, backlinks and link text become even more critical than usual. Pages (especially pages withlitte indexabe content) have been known to take top positions on the strength of just those four components.

And where possible (if the client is cooperative) the key is creating SOME html content, or even having alternative content for non-Flash visitors -- that's a good usability and accessibility step anyway. You can test the user agent to see if it has Flash capability, and if it does not, fork out to a non-Flash page.

If you do a Google search on site:webmasterworld.com for "SEO Flash" or "optimize Flash" you will find thousands of pages of discussion on this topic.

[tedster]

I see you also asked about frames. In themselves, framesets are not an indexing problem today for the major search engines. The challenge comes when a url for just one frame gets indexed and then visitors arrive their from a search, but without seeing the surrounding frames that help them navigate and make sense of your orphaned content.

In our Javascript Forum we have one solution for this situation. See [webmasterworld.com...] for the post that begins:

FORCE MANY PAGES INTO FRAMES
with one simple script