Still to this day media rich website applications have a difficult time being properly indexed due to the search engines inability to read those types of marketing efforts. Search engines are simply readers which rely on reading text in order to display the correct relevant information. Microsoft has created a new type of technology recently which many large brands have embraced in order to help them index their media rich content. It is called Microsoft Silverlight and it is supposed to offer much more powerful indexing capabilities for media rich content.
Rick DeJarnette had this to say on the official Bing webmaster blog:
“Right off the bat, there are several things you can do to help the search engine bot learn more about your Silverlight-infused pages. Because bots cannot “read” Silverlight content the way we can, the wise addition of metadata is all the more important in these pages. This information helps the bots interpret what is the theme of the page, how the content relates to other pages and sites, and provides keywords to help the search engine understand the page well enough to rank it accurately among other, relevant sites for search users.”
Indexing media and certain types of flash elements has always been a significant challenge for many businesses along with the search engines. Flash has since lost its popularity primarily due to its lack of ability to index information properly in search results. Rich media has only grown in strength due to the search marketing industry growing appendages like blogs, video sharing and social media. This new technology platform allows web users to implement other structural aspects in order to allow the search engines to really be able to crawl over the information and drop it into the indexed search results. The robots need something to grab onto in order to display anything in search results and Microsoft has made an attempt to overcome the age old obstacle that has stopped many internet marketers and SEO experts from using media type marketing efforts on their web pages. The end user and the community wants to see more than just text so this type of technology can come in very useful for many businesses.