Flash SEO/Indexing HELP! Need gurus fast...

Hey everyone!

I need some brilliant Flash experts to weight in on an article we wrote at the advertising agency I work for. We put an article together about the ability for Flash to be indexed by Google and Yahoo. It's a two sided debate between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guys and Flash guys. SEO is killing Flash right now in the debate...please help me and other Flash guys out and weight in.

http://www.nfusion.com/article/have-...nd-find-it-too

I appreciate the advice and information you guys can offer up!

Thanks!
brian

Well I'm really surprised that I don't see better use of Flash and swfobject with the use of alternate content, related to SEO and Flash. While the use of swfobject does involve creating alternate HTML content, so what! How else could you get the audio narration of a video indexed by Google.
To just quickly review what swfobject does, it simply re-writes a <div> with Flash content. That means that before the re-write, you can put in whatever html content you want! Text, images, links, etc. all content which is indexed by bots and spiders just like any other html. It's the best of two worlds, great indexing plus an animated display. With swfobject it's easy to take advantage of this and get your Flash content directly indexed.
Examples could include video narrations, mp3 song lyrics, detailed descriptions of images or animations seen on the screen...use your imagination!
Here's an example of a site which is still under construction, temp page has been up about 3 weeks.
http://www.cataractvideo.com/
To start building page ranking even during our construction phase, I included a Flash video placed on the temp page using swfobject and alternate content, which was an html text version of the audio narration of the video.
View the page source and scroll down to

Code:

---

<div id="right_panel_vid">
                        <div id="intro_video">
<!-- Alternate content -->

---

Google one of the phrases in the Alt content, like

Quote:

---

"A Thornton ring and 0.3-mm guarded diamond blade".

---

No really, go ahead and copy that phrase and paste it into the search bar of Google. cataractvideo.com comes up on the first page at the top of the list, even before the actual site is launched and even though it is content which would normally be inaccessable, the audio inside a video.
Far from being a hinderance, using Flash and swfobject allows you to cram more information into less space then just html alone. I doubt that anyone is advocating a "text only" approach to Web delivery. ANY image could benefit by being converted into a .swf and placed on the Web page using swfobject and alt content. Content which if used by itself, could be long, boring, un-interesting. "A picture is worth a thousand words." So use the picture but get the words indexed!!
Best wishes,
Eye for Video
www.cidigitalmedia.com