How to do Search Engine Optimization For Flash Websites

Hi,

How does one do Search Engine Optimization for complete flash websites.

Firstly does SEO only help in landing your site at the top when someone searches for keywords in google etc ? Or does it have other uses ?

Also ive been longing to ask. Does search engines such as google recognize words which are part of flash based text content. Say, words in a paragraph in the "About Us" page are scanned by google when reporting results to a search ?

The reason im askin if this kind of flash text is identified by search engines is because i heard from a person (who likely may not know what hes talking about) that its better to make HTML websites because html text is identified by search engines and flash text isnt.

After clarifying these if SEO methods can be briefly explained will be really helpful.

Thanks in advance. :)