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In my constant quest to master SEO, I’ve been honing in on the new concept of Google crawling flash swf files now.

I have recently came by an interesting website that has been performing different flash and seo experiments. What Flash n’ SEO is doing is pretty interesting and is worth the follow. Check out some of their experiments for more info.

But now for my flash and seo experiment…

{sidebar id=1}I’m not into making flash websites anymore because of many reasons. For one, its hard. Number two, its a thing of the past. And third reason, I just don’t like all flash sites…I always have that "trapped" feeling when I am on one. I’m more into banners or smaller website additions…where text and images simply cannot do the job. Yeah that’s me, Mr. Practical. ;)

Getting back to the experiment, I have had this thought in the back of my head…and so far, its working. My thought was to create some text content that is "off-canvas". By saying that, I mean that the content is not visible to the human eye. Check out the screen show below for a better idea.

The image above is that of what it may look like when creating a banner in flash. Since the banner or swf file is set to 460 x 60, the off-canvas content will not be seen, but is exported and included with the swf file.

The proof is in the pudding…

Just a week ago, I create a banner for a new website that I have been working on that looks like this and put it up on a partner website found here: www.valuecushions.com

In the off-canvas content, I put the keyword text " outdoor fire bowls and fire pits "…wow omg, the swf file has been crawled and indexed by google! Check the results here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=outdoor+fire+bowls+and+fire+pits+valuecushions

So, it works but what’s the point? Nothing really useful unless that content was within a site that actually could benefit from those keywords. At the time of this particular experiment, I only wanted to see if a Google Bot would actually read the off-canvas content. Because all other content except for the link target was images, that’s all that it had to crawl…which was good thing if I want my next experiment to work.

My next swf and seo experiment…

Since I now know that Google will successfully crawl a swf or flash banner, why not experiment with back linking? Every web designer knows or should know that back links are a big part of SEO so the more, the merrier. If you can use a simple phrase or set of keywords on a totally different site with a link back to the site that you are attempting to market, its always a huge help.

In this new swf back link experiment, I’ve created new off-canvas content with different keywords and also give it a link target. The swf file still contains the original link from the button as well as the linked keywords. My goal is to be able to achieve crawlable back links through a flash file.

If this works out, it would be
the best of both worlds. Getting back links where you need them to go with a target url and having a cool animated graphic to display as well. Thinking deviously, we may have to watch out for that guy that offers "free flash seo banners" with his links embedded in them. Mwhahaha!

I’ve just published this google flash back link seo banner experiment about 30 minutes ago, so I will have to report back in once I see some results. At the time of this posting, I’ve decided to keep the test locations discreet.