How do you SEO Adobe Flash? Is Adobe Flash SEO-friendly?

Question: How does one deal with SEO when utilizing Flash and other video options?

Answer: Oh, Cry my Beloved Country! This question is so important, I wanted to re-answer in email format – thanks for bringing it up!

Adobe Flash is just NOT SEO friendly despite what people tell you. People get confused between two concepts: A) CAN Google index Flash (yes!) vs. b) does it LIKE Flash (No!). To make it worse, both companies are in an alliance against Apple, so their corporate propaganda machines spew out content that says that Google likes Adobe Flash, PDF, etc.

Not true. Go and do your searches. Do major searches for competitive keywords. I guarantee you, you will NOT see Flash heavy pages in the top 10. You may see pages that have Flash but they ALSO will have text and/or they will be in non-competitive search markets and/or they will have zillions of inbound links…

Then, to make it more challenging, you may want FLASH and/or VIDEO for humans – because they are amazing, and make your site really cool and exciting for humans. So what is to do. Here are the basic options –

• Put the Adobe Flash at the TOP of the page, and put keyword heavy text for Google, below the fold.
• Create specific pages that are Google-friendly (lots of keyword heavy text) and some pages for humans that are NOT Google-friendly, but have cool Flash and/or Video. Then get an inbound pattern whereby searches FIND your Google friendly pages, and then click FROM these pages to your Flash pages.

This question is so common and so confusing, I have a tutorial post on it at http://www.jm-seo.net/SEO-tutorial/adobe-flash-SEO.html.