Web 2.0 & SEO

Web 2.0 is an extensively misused term on Wall Street. It is misapplied to many on-line entities to encourage investing into those companies still entrenched in Web 1.0 practices. Although much of the web’s structure and mechanics remain the same the way of conducting business on the internet has. Web 1.0 says, “Here is a product I will give or sell to you”. It’s a linear business approach. On the other hand, Web 2.0 is oriented toward customer participation and collaboration, an interactive business approach.

Delivering on services and goods, keeping your customers informed of new developments, or having a fancy website with all those funny applets is pretty much outdated. In order to succeed today, in e-commerce, a company must engage their visitors so that they come back. With this in mind one Web 2.0 platform could increase business, while on another your business may not do so well. Much will depend on the search channel you employ. But there are some things you can do to achieve more visibility.

Product blogs and wikis are optimal sources for search engine exposure, as these have replaced forums, traditional product reviews, user groups, and guest books. Blogs and wikis are rich in text, extensively interlinked, updated regularly, and based in semantic markup. Blogs and wikis will help you enlarge the search channel to take in and engage users, but only if you allow your customer and potential clients help drive your internet business.

Some of the interactive elements in podcasts, widgets, AJAX, and videos often confuse search engine spiders and this can prevent a user from finding your pages. If you intend to use these Web 2.0 elements to improve customer interaction and increase conversions then you’ll need to leverage syndication services, mirror sites, RSS, and XML to keep search referrals flowing.

Although AJAX can pose problems with spiders as Flash, it can pull data into a Web page’s background saving users click and wait time. However, there is other valuable pulled information that spiders can’t detect. On the other hand, XML and RSS are highly search engine friendly because they are rich in semantic markup. The only drawback to RSS is that it’s often not well supported in traditional Web search engines, except engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search.

The key to addressing these Web 2.0 problems, at the present, is for businesses to employ effective SEO tactics to expose invisible content to the search engine spiders. Keep in mind, spiders seek matches to a user’s search, so the more SEO strategies a company can put to effective use, in their web pages and marketing campaigns, the easier it becomes for spiders to do their job and get the customers to land on your pages.

However, when using SEO tactics you want to keep them specific to your industry. This will require researching and knowing your industry, as well as having an idea of those search words and phrase that most people interested in your goods and services would use to find your business on the internet.