Search Engine Optimization and RIA. A How To.

I hate SEO. Despise it. It’s such a struggle to even know *what* is more or less search engine friendly. SEO for RIAs is even more frustrating. While we know that spiders can crawl SWFs for static text, there’s nothing about how one could get a spider to even know to look for external content pulled in from an XML file.

Thankfully we have Ted. His implementation for Flex Directory is astoundingly brilliant.

1) Check out the source on the index.html of Flex Directory. All the companies are listed as they would be in any XML file.
2) Note the XSL embed on line 2, . Cracking open that XSL, we see the SWFObject call, embedding the SWF. That SWFObject embeds a FlashVar, “xmlurl” which points to document.location. He loads index.html into his application as an XML file. Viola.

Spiders will crawl the site and ignore the XSL, effectively disregarding the model/presentation layer/SWF/whatever you want to call it. They *WILL* be able to crawl the relevant company information though. And the site just points to its own index for it’s XML data. Simple, effective, amazing.