Page 1 of 1 One of the new features of Flash 8 enables your SWF file content to be more easily indexed — or rather, potentially indexed — by search engines. You can now add metadata that describes the content of your Flash movie (SWF file). The metadata is added to the head of the SWF file so that it's easily read. The metadata is specified in RDF (Resource Description Framework) and stored in the SWF file in a W3C-compliant format. In other words, Flash 8 creates and stores the metadata for the SWF file in a way that other applications can easily read the values.
The industry buzzword "SEO" stands for search engine optimization, which collectively refers to the process of designing web sites, pages, and assets so that content can be indexed and ranked effectively within search results. There are whole companies and agencies dedicated to helping businesses with an online presence better achieve visibility with search engine results. More often than not, web sites that use Flash movies (SWF files) extensively for content are left behind in search engines, because that content is not easily indexed. Search engines like Google can only index static text within a Flash movie. Most, if not all, of the text content loaded dynamically into Flash applications or Flash movies can not be indexed by current search engine technology.
Let's look at a few Flash examples on Google. A couple of years ago, I built a prototype video forum site, iknowbetter.com. The web page for this site is just one big Flash movie that loads forum posts, categories, and audio/video streams dynamically at runtime. If you go to Google.com and type the following search term:
iknowbetter.com
You'll only see one result: the main page to the web site. If you go to iknowbetter.com, you'll see that there are many posts that could potentially be listed within search results. Conversely, a forum like FlashSupport.com or my blog use more HTML than Flash. Therefore, many of those pages are indexed and searchable by Google. For example, if you search for:
DataGrid examples Flash
my blog entry pointing to some free DataGrid examples on FlashSupport.com is the first result displayed.
Note: The search results mentioned in this article were accurate at the time of this writing. Over time, as Google re-indexes content, search results may vary.
Even before Flash 8 introduced SWF metadata, though, you could use a search engine like Google to search for static text that appears within the Flash movie (SWF file). Go to the Google site, and type:
filetype:swf +"corpse bride"
The first result is a Flash movie (denoted by the [FLASH] category at the beginning of the result listing) featuring photos from the premiere of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride at the September 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. By using the filetype: keyword in Google searches, you can filter results to SWF files containing static text or other search parameters. You can also combine other keywords (or filters) with your Google searches. For example, you can combine the filetype: keyword with the site: keyword. The following search returns all of the SWF files indexed on FlashSupport.com by Google:
filetype:swf site:flashsupport.com
Within these results, you can find the Flash movie that I published from a previous article at CommunityMX.com. The site: keyword tells Google to look for results that have "flashsupport.com" in the host domain. So, combined with the filetype: keyword, the search results only display SWF content from FlashSupport.com.
Now, in Flash 8, you can assign a title and description to the Flash document in the Document Properties dialog box. With a Flash document open, choose Modify > Document to open the Document Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - The Document Properties dialog box in Flash 8.
Here you can enter a title and description for the Flash document. These values are automatically included with your Flash movie (SWF file) whenever you test or publish the movie.
Warning: Flash 8 does not automatically use the metadata title for any HTML document you include in the Publish Settings dialog box. The title and description are also not shared with the Accessibility panel. If you want to use these values elsewhere, you need to manually update the appropriate settings on your own.
If you type a title and description into the Document Properties dialog box for a Flash document, the data is inserted into the SWF file for the document whenever you test or publish the movie. To see what this data looks like, open the Flash tab of the Publish Settings dialog box (File > Publish Settings), and select the Generate size report check box. Close the dialog box, and test the Flash movie (Control > Test Movie). The Output panel displays the SWF metadata in the size report's Metadata heading, such as:
Metadata
--------
Bytes Value
----- -----
212 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/1.1/"><dc:title>CommunityMX: SWF Metadata</dc:title><dc:description>Learn more about Flash movie metadata.</dc:description></rdf:Description></rdf:RDF>
As the size report indicates, the metadata adds bytes to your final Flash movie file size. Be sure to keep your title and description values within a reasonable length to avoid unnecessary bytes being added to the SWF file size.
Tip: You can use Flash 8 to publish metadata to any SWF file, including Flash Player 7 or earlier movies.
To date, search engines have not started to index the metadata within SWF files on the Web. Hopefully, since the metadata is available to search engines in a W3C-compliant format, we'll start to see more Flash content displayed in search result listings.
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Keywords
Flash 8, SWF metadata, SEO, search engines, Google
