So you’ve created the best flash gaming website of the century. People at work all over the world would herald you as a genius for creating such a brilliant time-wasting masterpiece to help them get through their mundane day, only how do you make sure they can find you? Flash content is difficult for search engines to index, so here are five simple tips for you to make sure that when people search for games on search engines, your stand a chance to show up in the rankings.

So, how do you make sure that people can find your site online?

1. Make sure the page each game has its own URL.

You want people to be able to easily share a link to your content, and you want search engines to be able to direct the appropriate traffic to that content. Use descriptive words for your URL, and separate them with a dash (-) not an underscore (_). For example, a poorly named URL would be www.mygamesite.com/game_123.html. A more search engine and user friendly URL would be www.mygamesite.com/flash-games/name-of-my-game.html.

Note: Blindly updating URLs on your site could have dire consequences on your search engine ranking. If the pages already exist, be sure to setup a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, and update your navigation to the new URL in your site. You don’t want search engines or human referral traffic ending up at a dead end.

2. Post relevant content for search engine spiders on your site.

Any content found inside your flash game, or flash pages will be invisible to the search engines, making it hard for them to figure out what your think your site is about. Put plenty of text on the page to identify and describe your game - if the keyword you are targeting does not appear on the page in HTML, then you will have a difficult time ranking for that term. You may also find you have ad-targeting issues for any AdSense advertising you are running since the ad spider cannot determine your sites content to serve up relevant ads.

Consider keeping your flash elements separate from your graphical elements and content. For example, the homepage of Orisinal would be seen by Google as a barren wasteland (even the “legal stuffs” is flash based!), while to the human eye it appears to be very different. A better example would be FlashGames247 where each game has it’s own crawlable anchor text link and a good, clean URL.

3. Be sure to use descriptive page titles and meta description tags to help describe your content to users, and engines.

All major search engines will use your title tag on its search results pages, and may also use your description. This is your opportunity to stand out and be noticed by a human searcher scanning the results. Be sure to keep your title under 65 characters, and your description at about 200 (including spaces). More info on meta tags.

4. Be sure the navigation elements around your site are easily identifiable by engines so they can get to your content.

Some of the more sophisticated crawlers can follow javascript and flash elements, but they do not do it well and only use it for discovery. Use text links with descriptive anchor text where possible. If simple anchor text links are not an option, consider adding a sitemap page that is linked to from your footer in simple html, with simple html links on it. Ohh, and if you haven’t done so already, create a 404 page (which actually returns a 404 response) with links to your homepage and sitemap at the least. Here are some examples of creative 404 pages.

5. Help gamers share your content with their friends.

The more links from other sites pointing back to your gaming site, the more relevant you will appear to a search engine. Make it easy for gamers to link to, embed or share your content in a way that points traffic back to your games site. An example of a page that does it well is Addicting Games where you are prompted to “share with friends” toward the bottom of the page.

There you have it. Five simple things you can almost do in your sleep that will help search engines categorize your site and start sending you the right kinds of traffic.