Sitegeist Blog - Beitrags-Archiv für die Kategory 'Trends'

Web 2.0. It’s all the rage. For the past few years, it’s dominated online activity. Does it dominate you?

While some perverse folks dismiss the term ‘Web 2.0’ as meaningless, most agree that it’s used to describe ‘collaborative media’ or ‘social filtering’. Web 2.0 is all about interacting with your users/visitors/customers in an intimate and compelling way.

And, importantly, it’s about turning those people and interactions into a real community, allowing your site users to interact with each other. It’s brave. It exposes you to the judgement of the masses (or “the wisdom of the crowd”). It’s cool. It seems scary.

It’s not.

This Web 2.0 movement is marked by socially-orientated sites that utilise tools such as:

• blogs
• polls
• wikis
• RSS aggregation
• Twitter
• tagging
• tag clouds
• bit torrent (and peer-to-peer generally)
• folksonomies
• microformats
• podcasts and vodcasts
• user reviews and ratings
• mashups.

So what does your site need? Anything here? Or does it all sound like gobbledygook?

What websites need is a clear strategic vision, not the latest widget.

Knowing your business and knowing your website visitors’ needs will let you figure out what tools to provide, and how to deploy them. Web 2.0 is not technology: it’s a mindset that lets users share and collaborate.

Is it a mindset that would help your business?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Are you a fish and chip shop? Chances are your web visitors want to know your address, opening hours, prices and contact info. Chances are they don’t want to hang out and discuss frying techniques…

A couple of days ago I was in a meeting with a small group of enthusiastic entrepreneurs, discussing a new online retail venture. Being a startup, discussion quickly turned to SEO – search engine optimisation – and the techniques writers, programmers and SEO professionals use to get pages to rank higher in search engine results.

It’s a vital consideration, but it made me think…

Google (and let’s use ‘Google’ as a placeholder for ‘all search engines’) want to get it right. Google’s business success is founded on the quality of its search results. Its algorithm is a modern miracle, combining words on pages, page rank (essentially a site’s reputation), inbound and outbound links and a host of other considerations to rank results for any search term you care to think of.

Search results keep changing as Google tweak the results method; it’s an ongoing social experiment aimed at delivering the exact page you want.

So Google try to get it right, based on real websites and real user behaviour.

Yet clever SEO techniques distort websites and search results, trying to provide what they think Google wants to see. Dogs chasing tails or the other way around? Either way, users and usability lose out to copy written for machines, ‘link juice’, and distortions that give better results to whoever spends the most on optimisation.

Don’t get me wrong. I write SEO content almost every day. SEO is vital for business success. You’d be crazy if you didn’t take it into account on your site…

But it’s vital only because Google isn’t perfect. It doesn’t give you the right page, first up, every time. It needs our help.

And while we continue to subvert it to gain its love, it always will.