3 ways of Search engines indexing Flash websites.
Search engine indexing and Flash websites.
Three methods of getting a complete flash website indexed by search engines .
Homepage is the most important page for any website and some people want this page to look very dynamic and highly attractive and flashy as well . The problem with this type of a homepage is that a complete flash page is not indexed by search engines . Homepage is the "gateway" to the rest of the website . A search engine will enter from this gate to find the rest of your website . But if it is not able to enter , then how do you get your website indexed by search engines ?
As a website designer , I often get requests to develop flash websites . These websites are not just websites with flash embedded in them but are completely in flash . Meaning all the links , all the text presented in flash on the homepage of a website .
When you will visit my website , you will see that I also have a fair understanding of search engines as well . This brings trouble when a client sees this . They want me to get their "Complete flash" website indexed by google . Is that possible ? Yes .
How do I do this ?
There are three methods of getting a flash website indexed by google , msn and yahoo . Using these methods , you can get a flash website indexed by all the three major search engines .
Method 1 .
This is the easiest but generally clients do not like this method as it requires the website to display a simple text link to the site map outside the flash .
I generally talk to my clients and often am successful in convincing them to display a simple html link to their sitemap from the bottom of the homepage . The problem is that most clients do not agree on displaying a link outside the flash .
A sitemap is a html page that holds links to all the other pages in the website . One can add a site search engine to this page and organise the page as well . An example of a very old sitemap that represents the above description is at http://www.farishtaey.com/site_map.html .
That is only an example and the website has shifted to a new location .
Method 2 .
This is a little difficult . Search engines are constantly indexing the web . In this process they find new URL's on an existing old website and index them . One can get a link to a secondary page from such an old indexed website . The link could be to products page , services page , article or any other page that holds links to the rest of the website . The difficulty in this method is that is very difficult to get a link to an "internal page" from another webmaster .
One can also get a link from a blog . Don't just go an "spam" other's blog with your link . They might even
also block you from posting again .
You can get links from free web directories but most do not accept internal pages . There are very few who do and some also have a "nofollow" tag in the "rel" attribute which does not solve our purpose .
Method 3
This might sound a little weird but it works . Frames as we know are also not indexed by search engines but the text and links in "NOFRAME" tag do get indexed . Here we will use the frames and the NOFRAME tag to get our Flash website indexed . Here's how .
First instead of a simple HTML page , make three pages .
Page 1 - Master Frame .( index.html)
Page2 - Flash page . (anyname.html)
Page 3- Blank page with nothing . ( anyname2.html)
Now divide the Master frame in two rows of size 99% and 1% .
Call the flash page ( index.html) in the 99% frame area . Call the blank page in the small 1% frame area .
Now the main page ( index.html ) displays the flash and only the flash . The small area at the bottom is almost invisible and displays nothing . You can fill the blank page with the color of the flash to create a syncronising effect .
The frames should have a Frameborder="0" attribute preventing the border from getting displayed .
Don't forget to add proper text and a link to sitemap in the "NOFRAME" TAG . The search engine will follow the "NOFRAME" tag text and the link in it . You can have a nice search engine friendly article written in that area . The article is visible to only search engines and is completely invisible to browsers . Search engines will index the text and the links in the article as good as they index other regular webpages .
In addition to this , you should also add meta tags to your main page ( index.html) . Meta tags specially "http-equiv=Description" is still acceptted by many search engines including MSn search . They have it mentioned on their webmaster help page .
There is a meta tag generator and a small meta tag tutorial at http://www.website-design-software-india.com/meta.html .
Feel free to contact me for any help on the frames at http://www.website-design-software-india.com/ .
About the Author
S-jeet is a website designer offers html editor that has reduced website design time to less than 50%.For a short time offers free SEO guide,affiliate guide,marketting guide,200 templets,free updates and more with the editor.Get your copy now at http://www.website-design-software-india.com/sss12-html-editor.html .
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