Search engines are pretty much effective in fetching relevant traffic to the websites and since for most of the websites, more than 50% of traffic is originated through search engines. Therefore, the prevalent challenge these days is to fully index the flash websites that are made on the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) platforms. Several clients prefer to make their websites on various technologies and platforms that make use of RIA such as Ajax, Curl, JavaFX, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, and Flex. Adobe partnered with Google and Yahoo regarding this concern of making the Rich Internet Applications accessible to the search engines just as the other web applications.
A successful solution to this problem is Search Optimized Flash Architecture popularly known as SOFA. This solution has multiple benefits such as:
• It makes the flash website searchable.
• It provides accessible alternative web site.
• It provides links to content deep within the flash website.
• It also allows the user to use browser buttons to move forward and backward within the flash website.
The two key features for improvement of the Search Engine Optimization efforts are indexing and relevance. Over here, the indexing refers to directing the crawlers to what content and where it is located for crawling. Relevance refers to the deep linkable content that is interesting and catering to the user’s need so that they link to it. SOFA is a unique technique that can serve for both these SEO efforts within a flash website.
How Does The SOFA Technique Work:
It is a revolutionary technique for the Flash Rich Internet Application development platform and focuses on making the content of the flash website accessible and at the same time making it capable of indexing it too. The technique has now made it possible for the flash file (SWF) to be indexed by the search engine.
Commonly, the flash file is placed on an HTML page which in the recent times is converted into well developed into the XHTML as it is the well-formed XML file. This kind of file enables the developers to use the externalized content. What SOFA does is that it uses this XHTML as a flash content source and to locate the flash placement as well. Since the search engines can easily crawl through the XHTML, it can easily index the content of the flash website too. Hence, the first SEO effort of indexing the flash website is solved by the SOFA technique.
Second SEO effort is of linking. Generally, whenever a viewer of the website finds content in a search engine and links it, a check is prompted automatically to check if that particular user/viewer has flash or not. If the user does not have flash then the XHTML content is stylized with the usage of CSS so that he non-flash version of the page is accessible to the user. However, this is true only for a single RIA page. Therefore, when there are multiple deep pages and large quantities of content the above method just sounds too impractical. For this, the developer makes multiple XHTML pages with an index page following a navigation list which is inclusive on anchor links too. So the search engine crawlers follow the linked content and hence, the second major SEO effort is also actualized.
This the way a flash website can be turned into SEO friendly. Thus, this technique ensures the accessibility of your flash website by both the users and the search engines.
SEO Service India
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