Flash: Deep Linking + SEO in Flash

For a long time many developers have frowned on Flash for it’s lack of Deep Linking (Back and Forward buttons) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) capabilities. While I would not claim to be an expert at SEO, and I would be very cautious of someone who claimed to “guarantee” top spots on Google, I have found a good solution that seems to work quite well for my sites. Allow me to introduce you to SWFAddress and WordPress.

SWFAddress

SWFAddress is a small library of Javascript and Actionscript 3 Classes that allows you to split a flash movie into “pages” and when set up properly will allow you to link to specific parts of a flash movie and also utilise you back and forward buttons in your browser.

Visit their site at www.asual.com/swfaddress/

WordPress as a CMS

Every site needs some sort of CMS (Content Management System) even if the client does not want to update the site I still add a CMS to keep things easy for me and to avoid costly rebuilding if the client decides that they need a CMS at a later date. There are many CMS’s out there that will integrate with Flash but I prefer to use WordPress as it’s easy to use, very customisable and most importantly it’s free. See my previous post Import your WordPress Blog into Flash for more details. With a wordpress CMS you get an html version of the site that can then be seen by search engines and also viewed on products without the flash plugin.

Visit their site at www.wordpress.org

Obviously your google ranking will still depend on how prominent your keywords are and how appropriate your content is however I have found the combined solution of SWFAddress and WordPress to be a very powerful one that increases site visibility and makes it much more user friendly for both the client and the user.