One of the pillars of our digital practice at Flightpath is to integrate the art of technology with the technology of art. Nowhere is the fluidity of this precept more evident than in our SEO work. The best search-engine optimization requires a mercury-quick understanding of what is happening in any given market at any given time, what words describe that market snapshot in an informative, creative way, and what technology delivers the information in compelling design (incidentally, another of our tenets).
A major breakthrough for us, then, is Google's increased ability to index Flash. Flash, when it broke into mainstream consciousness, was the pretty new girl in school. Everyone was a little bit in love and wanted to take her for a ride, but there was a rumbling contingent that warned about the correlative probability that good looks can mean less substance.
This turned out to be true--Flash didn't offer much in the way of text that search-engine spiders could index; the crawlers couldn't link back to anything, because the browser didn't reload after interactivity. Even pages that spiders indexed were useless in search results, because users landed on Flash home pages instead of product pages.
Flash was . . . well, at least it was pretty.
But, then, last year, Google dedicated the resources to figure out how to index text in Flash sites:
[We] developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a
person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our
algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way,
and that content is then available to be indexed.
The trick, then, is to put the text that you want indexed "along the way" the algorithm travels. This might include adding text to Flash applications, including a Robots.txt file or adding alternative HTML code. Making sure the site's organizational strategy includes lots of deep links helps with long-tail optimization, and page titles have never gone out of style.
Essentially, as Google becomes more and more ubiquitous, making nearly everything about the digital space more inclusive and included in a more intuitive way, we can expect to allow our artistic strengths to shine in happy equilibirium with our market goals and technological requirements.
We have a project we're wrapping soon for an amazing, artistic client with big-figure goals that will show this to great effect. Stay tuned!
