Using flash, videos, and images are great ways to tell your story on websites. What you don’t want is, though, are great, story-telling multi-media that fail to attract the attention of search engines.
The solution is to ensure you optimize the underlying site architecture of your graphics and multi-media. Do that, and you’re site will stay finable through your multi-media.
Flash file indexing
Adobe Flash is a multi-media platform used to add animation to websites. Common uses are to add video to webpages, advertisements, and more recently, to develop web applications such as those using scripts.
If you want a Flash example, check out Intellicore Design’s home page and see the animation at the top of the page.
Google will index contextual content in flash files, including flash gadgets such as buttons and menus, to generate a snippet for your website. Google also indexes URLs that appear in flash files.
The secret behind the Google process is <er> still secret but Google indicated it uses an algorithm to explore the flash file.
Another cool thing is Google allows external resource loading to its Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when your SWF file loads content from some other file —such as text, HTML, XML, or another SWF — Google can index this external content too. Additionally, it associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
Google can’t index all flash files, such as those that use some types of JavaScript.
Video Indexing
Video Sitemaps – which is an an extension of Google’s Sitemap Protocol, helps make videos more searchable via Google Video Search. Through Video Sitemaps, webmasters can give Google direct links to their videos, as well as provide valuable descriptive information such as the video’s title and description.
The result is higher findability of your video content.
Image indexing
You can use descriptive ALT text to provide information behind the image the Googlebot can understand.
Keeping up with SEO advances
Google and other search engines are always fine-tuning their search processes and algorithms so you want to stay current on your company’s website.
It’s a worthwhile exercise to periodically access your website, not only for usability but also for SEO considerations.