Come, spiders, come

With the launch of a Flash-reading tool from Adobe, marketers can factor Flash into their SEO efforts, instead of compensating for the presence of Flash with extra text.

Adobe, the creator of Flash Player, developed a product that interprets Flash applications for web crawlers, making it possible to index that data for searchers. The technology was released to Google and Yahoo.

"This will open up millions of Flash files to search," said VP of marketing Michele Turner of Adobe (via TechCrunch).

As a result of the service, text and links from Flash apps can appear in search results for users querying relevant keywords, just like ordinary content, Adobe wrote.

Flash is used to build interactive banners, applications, games or eye-catching graphics on a site. Google is already using the Flash-indexing service; Yahoo "has some work to do," according to Turner.

For more information, read the SWF file format specification on Adobe.