What better way to show the spectacular vistas, the cozy living room, the high tech kitchen, and the private pool combined with a local flavor than a video tour.  Vacation home rentals were made to be shown this way.  Flash is great to capture the attention of shoppers and to hook them into exploring your offerings.  But be careful, it has not done much for you in helping shoppers find you while searching the web.  Until now, hopefully improvements are on their way.

Google and Adobe have made recent announcements around the improvement in Flash being used in SEO.  Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog used the following example of how a Flash website listing looked in search results before the new Flash crawling technology was installed:

And this is how the same Flash website listing would now appear:

The difference, as you can see, lies within the important descriptive content that Google can now index. This peek into Google’s accessibility, however, begs the questions: How well does Google index Flash? and How effectively can it be optimized for rankings?

Based on the information provided since the announcements, following optimization techniques for Flash pages:

1. The textual content within Flash can be optimized for specific keyphrase(s) to assist targeted rankings.
2. Text navigation within the website as well as text links within content can include keyphrase(s) to boost relevancy of the destination page. However, this is only applicable when Flash is separated into segments housed in separate files. For example, instead of creating a website entirely in a single flash file (i.e. www.xyzname.com/site.swf), the Flash file should be broken into segments housed in separate URLs (i.e., page1.swf, page2.swf, etc.).
3. Emphasizing (bolding) may help to raise the value of keyphrase(s). This seems to be a logical capability, but we don’t know at present if the new technology recognizes text emphasis.

Flash has made some amazing progress, but it still falls short of the efficacy of HTML when it comes to SEO.  Use it wisely.

Ralf

LiveRez.com

Tags: online vacation booking, vacation home rental, vacation property management, vacation rental, vacation rental software

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Industry Trends, Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Vacation Marketing, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.