Is the Flash vs. SEO War Over…?

April 1st, 2009 | design

I had a great meeting in Toronto last week with a cool design shop that builds high-end Flash websites. Modular white office in a derelict-come-trendy neighbourhood, eccentric business owners with fabulous design talent…

The owner had heard good things about my SEO business from a colleague and wanted to bring me in to chat about a potential partnership wherein my SEO and SMO (social media optimization) services would complement their Flash design offerings.

Fabulous idea re: SMO - given just how much rich media goes into one of their Flash sites: those high-quality, engaging videos really should be tagged, linked and placed strategically in video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, Viddler, Vimeo and many others. Ditto re: their great photos optimized on Flickr, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc.

BUT, for the SEO piece - what luck could I have working my keywords and writing strategies on Flash content?? (Google has long said that it can’t crawl videos, images or FLV files because they don’t have text content.)

Adobe Steps Up its SEO Game

Turns out, the world is changing quickly these days when it comes to Flash and its compatibility with SEO best practices!

Last week, Adobe launched its SEO Technology Center to finally address the incompatibility between their Flash technology and the ability to optimize those elements for search engines.

The Toronto Flash design company I visited says they’ve gone even further than Adobe; they sent me the white papers they’ve written about “SEO-Friendly Flash” and how they’ve gotten around the text-deficit problem.