Flash SEO using the noscript tag and a little HTML

by richardbaxterseo on November 27, 2008

I’ve just helped a very small reclaimed timber website get their first taste of SEO. Problem was the work allowed no additional development of the website, the budget was very, very small and the whole site is a single flash file. Ouch.

How do you optimise a one page flash website on an ultra low budget with no chance of changing the flash to a static HTML site? Fortunately, we all recieved a wonderful reminder of the value of <NOSCRIPT> tags from MSN’s very own Nathan Buggia at the recent SMX London.

In a situation where your content is invisible to search engines because of media rich files like flash, Nathan recommended creating what he called a “down level experience”. Here’s a screenshot from his “SEO for Web 2.0″ presentation:

nathan buggia's SEO for web 2.0 presentation

By using the <noscript> tags, we’ve at least got the chance to add some meaningful, search engine indexable content. By taking this approach you can quickly and easily apply some beautifully tagged semantic HTML using H1’s, H2’s and even H3’s. Sweet!

Here’s the before and after of our example website:

Before:

before applying noscript SEO

After using the <noscript> tag:

after applying some basic HTML into the noscript tag

I’ll return to this post and update you on the progress when the new SEO changes have been indexed and I can take a measure of the site’s ranking position. :-)

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 ronald September 17, 2009 at 7:28 pm

thank u =), i was looking for something like this

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2 Adrian Toma September 24, 2009 at 7:46 am

Google has a very good indexing system for flash content!!!
Check this example (search google with u can play)
You will see how google returns text from a flash component (placed on right side of the screen)

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3 Igor Chudov September 28, 2009 at 7:12 pm

Using display:none to fool search engines? Not a good idea.

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4 Raleigh SEO September 28, 2009 at 7:30 pm

It is signific ant when content is invisible to search engines because of media rich files like flash

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