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Object tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

The <object> doesn’t have an SEO influence by itself, but the included objects can alter the rankings of your website – i.e. if you include a flash file, then you need to know that the most important search engines will be able to read some of the text within the flash file, and therefore the text can alter your page semantics.

Usage and definition

<object> - This tag is used to include objects such as images, audio, videos, Java applets, ActiveX, PDF, and Flash.

Using the <object> to tag allows you to put in proper HTML code – including links, headers and other formatting, just above the closing it (see sample below):

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”flashtest.swf” width=”300? height=”100?>

<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE=”flashtest.swf”>

<PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high>

<PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#CCCCCC>

<h3>A Flash Movie</h3>

<p>A little fish swimming around |

<a href=”http://www.mcanerin.com/”>This is a Flash Button</a></p>

</object>

What designers should know

• A better alternative to flash can be an combination of CSS and Javascript, for example if you want to add a slider on your site, just search “seo friendly slider” and you will find plenty of examples
• Don’t design sites completely Flash; they will not be indexed properly in search engines and it will make it very difficult to be ranked
• When you start prototyping a site try to think of design elements that don’t rely to much on media files and rather design with pure text – typography alone can create impressive designs

What SEO professionals should know

• Use Google’s Developer Toolbox or your Google Webmaster Tools account and Fetch as Googlebot, to see how the GoogleBot would cache the <object> tag
• For all media objects like music, video, flash or silverlight come with a failsafe plan and extract the text within those files and publish it as “pure text” on the website (i.e. caption for movies, lyrics for music, text from flash files repeated on the site)
• you use RDFa Rich Snippets to enrich your search results pages on Yahoo! and Google to include a video next to them.

What programmers should know

• The usage example above is related to flash embedded files. I suggest optimizing your flash files rather than providing too much content within the <object> tag
• object tag is not rendered properly by IE and there may be problems with HTML validation

What copywriters should know

• Wherever media files included with <object> tag are supposed to display text, it’s your job to make sure the text is appealing to the audience and is conversion oriented
• The same advice given to the SEOs applies to you too: extract the text and publish it as pure text on the website (i.e. caption for movies, lyrics for music, text from flash files repeated on the page)

On a side note you can use the <object> tag to get links by embedding your YouTube videos across the web. If you want the get a bit gray hat with the code above, you could put your link inside the <object> tag.

 

About the Author

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an Internet Marketing Company that provides services to SMB clients around the world. For more information about this SEO Company visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com

 

Author (artsubpsm). Submitted on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 Time: 8:09 AM

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