To the skilled web designer Web 2.0 invokes a technical definition referring to fairly new applications that are being implemented on the Internet to improve the usability and/or aesthetics of web sites. These applications known as RIAs present an interesting dilemma to anyone involved in creating as well as finding these sites. Search engines that find and index web pages by crawling HTML code, are presented with the challenge of expanding their crawling capabilities. Clients want to give their customers the best user experience to increase loyalty, but do not want to sacrifice the organic traffic and brand awareness received from the major search engines natural listings. The SEO is caught somewhere in the middle, scrambling to find a solution for the client and cursing the search engines for their limited indexing abilities. As a result of this RIA conundrum SEOs will be forced to become increasingly tech savvy in order to work closely with RIA architects and web designers while building the web sites. By fully understanding search engine algorithms and RIA technology it is possible to
embrace the RIA applications of Web 2.0, while increasing, or at least maintaining SEO results.
Currently, in addition to PageRank and similar link based algorithms, search engine spiders rely on metadata within the HTML code to determine the contents of a webpage. The most common definition of metadata is “data about data.” An example of metadata in the HTML code as it refers to a webpage is as follow:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="BKV is a full service direct marketing agency specializing in direct mail, broadcast media production and planning, interactive media and search engine marketing.">
Above is the “meta description” of the BKV homepage. The text is a type of data that is in reference to the data, or content, that fills the webpage. This description (meta description) is crawled by the search engine spiders in order for them to index the contents of the website. Because spiders crawl from page to page, internal linking between pages of a web site is important. Increased interconnectivity improves the likelihood that the spiders will crawl and index the entire site. For this reason the inclusion of a sitemap is a common SEO tactic because it provides a concise hierarchy of the pages and links that make up the website.
With the use of RIA, all of the above crawlability disappears. Pages are written in Javascript instead of HTML, and the applications no longer require the refreshing of entire pages. For this reason RIA based web sites are not made up of pages with unique URLs, and as a result they lose the benefit of the interconnected pages. Until search engines implement a new way of indexing the Web, where does this leave those who want the usability of RIA but do not want to sacrifice their high search rankings? According to Matt Cutts, senior engineer at Google, “the vast majority of sites are still built as static Web pages, so we don’t foresee a problem at this time.” This answer does not indicate any alarm on the part of the leading search engine. Companies that want to have the usability of RIA, while maintaining search engine accessibility will have to consider building two separate websites with unique URLs. Designing separate sites is not to be confused with the black hat SEO tactic known as “cloaking,” which means the serving of different versions of a webpage based on whether the search agent is a user or search engine spider. While the need for talented RIA web designers will no doubt drive up web design costs, if companies want to keep their presence on search engines they will be forced to spend more money on SEO and traditional web design. Building and maintaining entirely search engine oriented websites will become a common practice for companies that demand the usability of RIA. Despite the aforementioned, the professional SEO must also be the one to forewarn the clients about the overuse of RIA. An entire site should not be made in RIA just because it can be. It will be the SEOs job to team up with the web designers to determine what parts of a site can remain static in order to salvage indexability from a search engines stand-point. The SEO of Web 2.0 will have enhanced technical skills in order to deal with this RIA search challenge.
