What Is Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a catch phrase and like most catch phrases, it gets misused and its meaning becomes more and more vague with each reference. A pretty solid definition of Web 2.0 can be thought of as this: the Web has evovled since the bubble burst in 2001, and now if you want to have a successful site, you must engage your visitors. In these terms, a site can be seen as successful if it is scalable, compatible amongst browsers/devices and allows users to control their own data.

In most common cases of the term Web 2.0 being used, it is in reference to the interactivity of a site. Good examples of this type of site are social networking sites, wikis, and blogs. These have for the most part replaced things like product reviews, comments and guest books and user groups.

SEO and Web 2.0 Go Together!

Web 2.0 sites succeed because they are naturally SEO friendly. Things like blogs are already textually rich, with many interlinking pages, rooted in html markup, and very often updated. They of course are very inticing for visitors to use, and give them a reason to come back and keep visiting. A web 2.0 site has to meet more standards, both SEO standards and the rising standards of the user.

When we speak of interactivity it not only refers to sites that allow for user maintained data, but also to interactive components like animations and other moving parts. Often times these components consist of flash elements or AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML). Everyone at this point has heard of Flash's problems with search engines, and those problems still remain (crawlers cannot extract content or links from .swf files).

A more SEO friendly interactive component is AJAX, although it still comes with some complications. AJAX is heavily used by google, and supported by their spiders (gmail is run on AJAX).  AJAX, however relies heavily on Javascript and a lot of these behind the scenes functions cannot be read by SE spiders. Still,
AJAX is more compatible for SEO.