Skill : SEO
Without SEO your website doesn't exist. It's useless in a way because people won't find it and even if it's full of fantastic informations it won't get the traffic it deserves.
It might seem a bit odd for a company specialized in Flash content to talk about SEO. Flash is famously known to be very bad in content indexation and help your content to pop out in Search Engines.
Flash's curse
Flash content is not basically indexed by Google (and others) because the bots don't crawls through Flash. Everything that's in the swf stays in it and can't be read. Adobe tried a few tricks like adding in the html the text it could find on the .fla scene. It's almost useless because that text doesn't reflect the real content of the swf, furthermore if you play with dynamic datas, located in an xml file or in a database.
A few SEO specialists decided at that point that a Flash website could never be on the first page of a Goog request. What a mistake.
Methods to index a Flash website
Create the html equivalent of your flash content
You can find several solutions to index a website whose content is stored in .swf files. The solution we recommand and use regularly is the html duplication of your content. Basically and with a bit of Javascript you can create all the tree of your website in html and add a code on each page wich will show to the users only the flash. Sear engines will crawl through your html pages and index everything while the users will only see the flash content.
Generate html mirrors pages of your flash pages
The solution above is not the best one but it works fine. If your website handles dynamic contents you can go further. We usually separate the datas in our projects to allow the client to change the content on his own. It's easier for everyone once everything is set up. The Lapin Blanc Collective has developped a backOffice (Content Management System) in flash/php/xml that we use on almost every project to manage datas. The content is stored in an xml file with a logical tree that follows a common pattern and we've worked on it with Yannik Bouvard, SEO specialist, in order to find a smart way to display this content both in the flash website and in php pages linked between each other like a real html website. Search engines crawl the content of the html pages and this content is displayed as a description in Google. When the user clicks on the link the flash player is detected and the Flash content replaces the html description. If the client changes the content of any page, the updates can be seen in the html version as well through php.
Play with url rewriting and remote control of your flash website
We wanted to go further because if you click on a link on Google about a page on a specific section of the website, it may be frustrating to get the home section of the flash website first and to have to navigate through the whole website to find the page you were looking for at first. Using FlashVars we can tell the swf wich section is aimed by the user and boot the website directly on the right page. This method can be used slightly differently from within the flash website. When the user navigates through the website from the inside (aka from the flash) we update the url dynamically. It allows the user to see where he is in the website and use the back button like in a "regular" html website. You can even store the url to use it as a shortcut to go to the page you want.
With all these described methods you can target each and every page you want and still get the advantage and smoothness of the Flash format to display your contents, allowing you like no other format to play with video, sound, images with no limits. The html is full of datas, handled dynamically for the search engines and everything is transparent for the user.
In conclusion SEO can be done easily with flash if you know what to do with your contents and know the good methods to get it.
