"We want to bring our brand to life and give our audience an exciting, immersive, interactive experience. Oh, and the site has to rank well in Google, too."

Now, that might sound like a reasonable request for a client to make of his digital agency. After all, our creative teams make brilliant use of Flash to build rich media applications that engage and delight. But as you may have heard, Google's crawlers can't search the content of full-Flash or Flash-intensive websites. That inability effectively bars rich media sites from the top ranks of search results – which is exactly where our clients want their sites to be.

That is why Nurun's Flash teams resolved to find a way to make those sites search-engine compliant. Early attempts to work around the problem yielded disappointing results: unless Flash was kept to a bare minimum, the site's searchability remained compromised.

After much experimentation, our Flashers came up with an idea that looked promising. They took a well-known workaround, which consists of placing a series of linked, content-specific (and therefore searchable) HTML pages behind a rich-media presentation layer, and added a twist: SWFObject, a small JavaScript file.

The team also ensured that the site content resided on (and was retrieved from) a centralized server. By combining these three “fixes” in the right way, the team could build a fast, fluid and search-friendly Flash website.

But although the solution worked, Google still had doubts: to them, it seemed too complex, too hard to verify… The Nurun Flash team went back to work, in an effort to document their solution and show that it could be made “Google-compliant.”

The efforts have paid off. At the SMX Advanced Seminar held in Seattle on June 3 and 4, Google announced its acceptance of SWFObject v.2.

Our Flash team is happy (and proud). Our SEO team is very pleased, too. But it is surely our clients who benefit most – now they can have rich media and high Google rankings, too.