Flex 3: Project Architecture & SEO

I've got a Flex 3 project. One of the problems I have is that not very much of its content is indexed by Google. Currently, I pull data from a mySQl database, so the Googlebot doesn't see most of the site.

My goal is to increase the amount of content indexed by Google, improve the SEO, and improve SERPs.

I thought that instead of pulling the data from the database that I would change the project's architectu开发者_运维百科re and create separate "pages". So, in my case, I would compile each puzzle separately and upload it to the server in its own directory. This way the info in each puzzle would get indexed.

The negative is that if I add a puzzle, I'd have to add a link to it in all of the puzzles that are already on the server. I would have to add the link, re-compile each puzzle and upload it to the server. Is there a way to get around this problem? Also, if I wanted to communicate some data from one puzzle to another in the future, I wouldn't be able to do so.

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

-Laxmidi

The usual way to achieve this goal is to develop a hidden parallel site in HTML. On the first page you will have your flash and, hidden by javascript, a list of links to the other pages. These links will be parsed by the robots. Ideally, the href pages are virtual (look for "url rewriting"). On each "fake" page, your server-side language will print on the page a content or links from your database AND the flash. The flash will be provided with a string explaining where it is and what it's supposed to show.

Ex: http://www.mysite.com/category1/content7 The URL rewriting sends this request to http://www.mysite.com/index.php?uri=category1/content7. The page should display the Flash with FlashVar "uri=category1/content7". The Flash knows which content it has to display so when an user comes from google, following this link, he will find the content he was looking for.

Every linking and content for SEO should be in HTML, don't trust robots capability of reading Flash.

have a look at Adobe's reference on deep-linking. you can generate a website's sitemap.xml with a cron process (daily), such that the URLs encode the state of the application you need. This URL will encode whatever content you need to retrieve from the db, with just one index.html page.

good luck!