Web 2.0 and Search Engine Optimization

It would be great if all of those cool new Web 2.0 interactive elements, based upon AJAX and Flash, things like widgets, Google Maps, content overlay panels, etc. were search engine friendly. Unfortunately, these technologies are inherently unfriendly towards search engine spiders. User friendly usually does not translate into search engine friendly.

Should you avoid Web 2.0 functionality that improves the user experience for your visitors? If your budget is incredibly small, perhaps. In an ideal world I believe you can have your cake and eat it too. You can harness Web 2.0 technologies for wider syndication, improving conversion ratios, enhancing the user experience to engage your audience and still rank on the first page. I believe that you should design for your site’s visitors, not the search engines.

Search engines will not index AJAX and Flash you just drop onto the page as is. A common misconception is that somehow AJAX (Asynchronius JavaScript and XML) is superior to Flash when it comes to achieving top rankings on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com. When it comes to SEO, they both suck!

But for the visitor, Web 2.0 content delivery can keep them returning almost every day. Like Flash, AJAX can greatly enhance the user experience, pulling data seamlessly into an already loaded web page. Your visitor doesn’t have to click and wait as one page after the other is loaded. This saves your visitors time and they appreciate it. There are some workarounds we employ that make it possible to index the dynamic content that is generally invisible to search engine spiders. The ‘J’ in AJAX is ‘JavaScript’. Search engines can’t execute JavaScript commands. While Google is able to index text and links inside Flash, some additional text must be made available at a markup level to assist them in indexing your content. Because Google can index some of your Flash content I believe it could be argued that Flash sucks less than AJAX when it comes to currying the favour of the search engines. One solution with Flash is to provide a progressive enhancement approach, where content is provided for both Flash enabled and non-Flash visitors. With AJAX, just as with Flash, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the application for search engine spiders and JavaScript-disabled browsers.

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