The technology for SEO on Flash is still limited currently. The robots provided by search engine cannot read the content inside the Flash. If your page is composed of Flash without any other content, then you will be in trouble. As one should note, the best website without people visiting is a total failure.
However, all of us know that Flash can provide a rich user experience to us by doing a lot of fansy things. This is particularly true before Web 2.0 and AJAX appear. Even AJAX is becoming popular, it is still a programming language of Dynamic HTML and Javascript. These are still a high wall for those designers to get involved. Thus, some people start to think of ways to work around the situation.
SWFObject
One of the methods is provided by Geoff Stearns, creating a tool named SWFObject. The method of this toolkit is to place the Flash object into the html dynamically using Javascript with the innerHTML attribute of DIV DOM node. Before the browser runs the javascript code, site administrator can put the description text inside the DIV. Whenever the robots come to the page, they do not run the javascript code and thus see the description and index them. For a browser viewed by user, the javascript is in fact run, and the description text will become disappeared. Oh, what a great tool.
Drawback
The main drawback of this toolkit is that site administrator need to write the description in text one more time, which is like creating the content in both HTML format and Flash format. Someone may argue AJAX is so mature now, doing duplicate things are stupid. Why not develop a better AJAX web? May be they are true.
Anyway, this is a good tool if you still believe in the fantasy of Flash. Besides this, the new technology, Flex, which is developed by Adobe, may also fit in to provide fantasy flash and SEO as well. Flex is somehow kind of XML. It can run flash component by fitting in XML content, so the XML content can be indexed by search engine. It may be the future trend.
