Ranking Flash Websites
Version 0.1 (Messy and porely writen). This article set about getting Flash Animation websites to rank on search engines.
SEO Basics
For anyone serious about search engine ranking, you have probably noticed that the most important ranking technique is content. The quality of your content is your biggest assist when it comes to ranking.
Secondly you will need to get a few high ranking links. Keep a good balance of quantity and quality - the link text, title and surrounding text are all important to your rankings. Try to avoid placing links on site that require a recipricol link as they will partly cancel each other out.
Flash Templates
The main concept I use is flash templating. Like any other templating system it should be completely independant from the content. Aside from the benefit for allowing you to make your website Search engine friendly it also becomes reusable.
What the Flash Template does is render content, for example generates the menu, text, images and any transitions between pages. It's a good idea to use strict XHTML formatted content because xml is pretty easy to parse within actionscript. If you can, 100% actionscript templates are the best when it comes to reusablility, this is explained in more detail later.
XHTML Content
Write you content as if you're building the world's most boring website. Starting with index.html, which will simple include html,head,title,body,h1 and p tags. Also include your navigation somewhere inside the body, keeping it simple like a div tag with an id and a tags linking to other pages like contact.html,info.html etc
Load The Flash
As you are problably think at the moment you have only got a simple black and white text only website. The next step is to replace this with your Flash Animated Template. The technique for this is to clear the contents of the body tag (innerHTML='') and replace with object/embed tags. I would suggest using swfobject from adobe.
A nice trick at this stage is to pass the current url via flashvars using document.location.href, that way the flash template shows the user the correct content for the page they arrive on. In the case that the search results give a link to your contact.html page visitors will want to see that not the intro or the home page.