Diane Cipollo said
There is something special about a Flash website. I don't mean a site that has a Flash header or gallery slide show. I mean a website made totally with Flash such as the beautiful site created by Lightmaker for the author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling. Her site is an "experience" due to the interactive elements but still manages to get the information to the viewer.
Many people shy away from a site created totally in Flash because of the problems search engines had in the past when indexing a Flash site. Well, things have improved over the last few years and this book, Search Engine Optimization for Flash by Todd Perkins, dispels these old notions and teaches you the new methods to optimize your Flash site. When Perkins talks about SEO, he considers the techniques used to optimize a non-Flash website as important to optimizing a Flash website as Flash SEO techniques. Therefore, this book has a dual purpose. It not only teaches SEO for Flash but for non-Flash sites as well.
Perkins starts with an overview of what you need to know to get the most from the techniques in his book and how the major search engines Google and Yahoo index websites. Next, he discusses how to optimize the non-Flash aspects of your site with proven techniques such as XML sitemaps and web standards for the separation of content and presentation with CSS and XHTML. He also covers the most common pitfalls such as too much JavaScript or dynamic text and how to correct these mistakes. The reader then completes an exercise for creating a simple SEO site.
Moving on to Flash specific SEO, he discusses each Flash SEO technique in depth, including sample code. He follows each discussion with practical exercises. He discusses techniques such as how to use SWF and XMP metadata and the importance of HTML in Flash to increase your SEO. He also covers Flash SEO JavaScript including flashvars, SWFObjects and SWFAddress deep linking. After installing a test server, you learn about dynamic Flash applications and related SEO challenges. He then moves into the Flex framework SEO and how it relates to Flash SEO. He discusses when and where to apply the same techniques you have learn for Flash to your Flex applications. Finally, he uses two sample websites to teach ways to evaluate and improve Flash SEO.
Todd Perkins is a web developer and consultant. As a Certified Flash Instructor, he has authored three books on Flash and many hours of video training.
Jasper said
I recommend this book highly for anyone that wants to make a web site more search engine friendly. The concepts are explained clearly and the code examples help show how to implement SEO concepts. Although the focus of the book is making Flash sites more search engine friendly, this book is so helpful with SEO that it is a valuable resource even if you don't have a Flash site. I also appreciated that the book is concise; the author gets to the point and it is not padded with non-essential details.
Midwest Book Review said
Search engines are fully capable of indexing all content in Flash-based websites, if the site is set up properly for search engine optimization. That's where Search Engine Optimization for Flash comes in: it discusses what content in searchable, how to place HTML content in a Flash application, and how to understanding limitations and potentials. Any Flash programmer needs this.
M. Chan said
This book spends a lot of time explaining to users what SEO is and how search engines work and with some good info on how you can use HTML or PHP to add searchable text. But being a Flash book, it only touches very little actual techniques that would help advanced Flash developers. It talks about SWFObject and SWFAddress but fails to dive deeper in how you might address the biggest issue of searching multi-page (or deep-linkable) Flash sites and using other techniques like XHTML or Javascript to dynamically change the metadata or noFlash div content so search engines can search each "page" with the Flash sites.
Good for Flash developers just started to learn about SEO but there is noting much new for advanced Flash developers
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