Until now, if you designed a website in Flash, you were out of luck in terms of SEO. Search engines in fact could not read Flash and this means that even a rich, very targeted site would not come up in search engine results.

You can see that searching is inacurate as many great sites are Flash only.

This is scheduled to change in the future as Adobe has said they will start working with leading search engine companies such as Yahoo! and Google to make the SWF Flash file format readable.

Many in the industry think this is a big deal and I tend to agree.

One of the areas where this move can be most important is in reduced duplication of effort. Many sites which develop in Flash also develop a seperate but equivalent HTML site for SEO reasons. Obviously this is duplicated effort and makes no sense in the long term. Now, companies can comfortably develop Flash-only sites without the need for site duplication.

See Also:

Adobe Flash goes VoIP
Flash-to-SIP Video Calls