SEO in the World of Web 2.0

Unlike Flash and AJAX, RSS is inherently search engine friendly. That’s because an RSS feed is an XML file, and XML is text-rich with semantic markup. But RSS isn’t well-supported in traditional Web search. It is within certain vertical engines, such as Google Blog Search and Technorati, but those aren’t the mainstream search engines that catalogers care about.

Over time, the major engines will get better at interpreting the XML and using the extracted data for ranking purposes. For instance:
• counting the links contained within the feed as votes; and,
• taking the anchor text of those links into account for ascertaining the linked page’s keyword theme.

In the meantime, prepare for this inevitability by making one or more full-text — not summary — feeds available on your site through text links and by including within those feeds at least 20 items (not just the default 10). Each item should have a keyword-rich title and keyword-rich text links contained within the product’s HTML-encoded content.

RSS Fuels Podcasts

We have RSS to thank for the podcasting revolution. It’s the RSS feed with “enclosures” of audio or video files that makes it a podcast, not the fact that it has audio or video files available for download. For those catalogers producing podcasts, use the ID3 tags of your MP3 files to incorporate show notes, images and a link to your podcast feed. Then, syndicate your feeds via multiple venues for optimal exposure on the Web.

Some Web 2.0 technologies already are primed for search engines straight out of the box. Blogs and wikis are two such technologies. Google seems to love blogs — the rich textual content, the widespread interlinking between blogs, the intricate network of internal links, the frequent updates, the semantic markup, etc.

By then applying specific blog optimization tactics — such as using “sticky” posts to add keyword-rich intro copy to category pages, incorporating topical tag clouds and tag pages into your blog, and overriding the automatically generated title tags with custom-written ones — you can really make your blog hum. Wikis tend to do fairly well in search engines, too, because wikis are text-rich, frequently updated, and heavily linked internally. But they’re also more susceptible to spam, and the content is only as good as the contributors.