The internet today is a commonplace tool that you find pretty much everywhere. That doesn’t seem to be much high praise, because there are plenty of things that are everyday things that you see everywhere, like tables, chairs and pencils. But when you take into account that the internet is only30- 50 years old and has enough impact to shift the very nature of the global economy, that is drastic growth. I think it’s more famous than sliced bread. And it still continues to grow at a rapid pace. The internet today is a far cry from its original format. It is faster, has more content than a single person could look up. And it is getting more advanced with more people taking part and gaining worldwide access. We are now entering the beginning stages of Web 3.0 with interactive artificial intelligence, and advertisements customizing themselves to an users personal browsing habits. But how did we get here? What was the bridge between text-based commands and targeted advertising that almost feels like it reads your mind? That’s why we will talk about Web 2.0.
What is Web 2.0?
For as much as a buzz word it has become, there is no hard definition of Web 2.0. This can lead to a lot of confusion about what it is . And if it is an important stage at all. What we know for starters is that the term was initially coined by Tim O’Reilly in his own sponsored web conference in 2004. According to a report by Semanticscholar.org, “Web 2.0 incorporates concepts such as weblogs (blogs), wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting, really simple syndication (RSS), and video sharing sites (like YouTube). “
When you combine the previous statement with another “Content is King,” you start to get a better understanding of what it is. It is a more efficient way to find and store information on the internet for people to see. There are three elements inside Web 2.0 that can point to this conclusion.
- Detailed and optimized web content for easier cataloging.
- Social bookmarks that store and sort saved web pages for faster access and anyone to see them.
- Rss: A feed that contains a summary of content from a Web site, along with a link back to the original content. Users can subscribe to feeds in order to automatically see the latest updates on a particular site. RSS formats feeds using the extensible markup language (XML).
How does Web 2.0 work for SEO?
Organic search engine optimization, especially in the world of marketing, can be time cost effective in terms of finance. However, what you can save in money you would lose in time. Indexing these sites to make them Web 2.0 friendly is time consuming and requires several elements for the marketer to take care of if you want it properly indexed.
Some of it falls under typical SEO practices. Others, require the extensive know how of basic code, and how markup languages work. There are also some technical issues that are slowly rendering parts of Web 2.0 out of date.
For example, a lot of guides mention the use of Flash for markup. Adobe just recently announced that they would no longer support the technology in December 2020. In computer language that means any network responsible for keeping Flash running gets shut down. No one can make or play any videos or games from Flash. Unless the developers of both things will switch the code and design to HTML 5/ CSS .
Which Parts of Web 2.0 is Relevant?
The creation of content, back linking, marking keywords and page authority are still relevant for today’s SEO. These things are part of basic SEO principles of sharing and creating relevant content. Google looks for relevance and other sites to vouch for the credibility to figure out where to put it in the search results.
However, there are right ways and wrong ways to do it and if you overdo it or underdo it, Google will penalize you or your site just go unnoticed. Both are a death sentence for a website on a search engine.
Conclusion
We are far past the development phase of the internet, but we have fully yet to arrive. Because there is a greater demand for accuracy, and a high amount of information, we are still fine tuning ways to sort through it all. There are still hot-button issues that need solving, such as what Cambridge Analytica was doing with Facebook and privacy laws for children on the internet. These things are all important and with time and ingenuity, we will see a day when these are tackled with future versions of the web.