A Flash SEO Tool

Posted by Moxie Zhang on Mar 04, 2010

Sections

Development

Topics

Java ,

Rich Internet Apps

Tags

Flash

Unfortunately, you cannot avoid the issue of search engine optimization (SEO) when developing an Adobe Flash-based Flex rich Internet application (RIA) or Flash Website.  Fortunately, the Flash SEO Tool has been designed to help!  InfoQ recently spoke with the developer of this new tool, Peter Gwiazda, for more information.

Gwiazda, who is also the creator of the Legato Flex Framework, explains:

The Flash SEO Tool lets you add text content for Googlebot to your Flash/Flex site and gives you some SEO optimization capabilities.  The idea is to make it as simple as possible.  No matter what the source of data is (XML, database, etc.), it lets you create text content the same way. You can probably plug the SEO tool to your finished application.

On his motivation to create the Flash SEO tool, Gwiazda notes, "In my day-to-day work I see that lack of SEO capabilities is the main argument against rich application interfaces.  I had some concepts and experiences with leveraging SEO for Flash platform.  Flash SEO Tool is a proof of concept now.”

Regarding the concept, Gwiazda says:

The concept of "fake" HTML sites and JavaScript (JS) redirect is well known and widely used.  For example, Gaia Flash Framework makes use of it.  I've created HTML sites from the same database content several times, and I thought it should be possible to do this automatically.  The Flash SEO Tool makes it possible to create and update SEO content under the Flash application, without any server-side coding.  After you collect your data from XML or AMF and prepare it to display, just send it back to the server as a complete SEO page with title, path, content, keywords and description.  So you add new pages or change content as usual, then run site-in update mode and the data appears in html content.

Gwiazda’s Flash SEO Tool is currently hosted on Google Code and a download will be available soon.

• Older >