We talked last week about what Web 2.0 is and how it has developed over time. Here, we will discuss some of the Web 2.0 strategies you should be utilizing for your website or business.  Think of this as a Web 2.0 checklist for getting started.

First, does your website have a blog?  Blogs are a perfect way to constantly increase the content of your site.  Not only do you have the content that you write and post, but then you get the benefit of user participation in the form or questions, comments, or discussions.  This user generated content will constantly grow your website and all you had to do was post an article or discussion.  Blogs are also a great way to establish yourself as an authority on your subject or industry.  You have the opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, answer questions, and lead discussions, all in a very visible forum.  And while updating your content on a regular basis doesn’t directly improve your search engine rankings, it does get the search engines to index your site more often.  So if you are practicing good SEO, and your blog is constantly growing, the search engine spiders are going to visit your site more often and your rankings will improve based on the SEO you’ve worked so hard on.

In addition to having your own blog, it is also important to participate in discussions on other people or companies’ websites.  This gives you an ever important backlink to your site.  Just make sure you are focusing on blogs and discussions that are relevant to your website or business.  Relevant backlinks are one of the best ways to improve rankings.

Another tool to utilize in your Web 2.0 efforts is article submission sites.  Submitting well written articles in relevant areas both helps to further establish that you are an authority on your subject, as well as gives you another relevant backlink.

The last area of Web 2.0 I will talk about here is the still growing popularity of social networking sites.  Setting up a MySpace and Facebook page at the least, is a great way to get exposure for your company.  You get the benefit of user generated content, another relevant backlink, and your website or company is exposed to thousands, potentially millions, of people that normally may not ever find you.

Let us know what you think, or if you’re having trouble getting started.

Never Stop Improving!

The first phase of the internet, before search engines were popular and before people were sophisticated enough to know how the web works, or before we started to define how the web works, the internet was a bit of a wilderness of disjointed information. People would find things and tell their friends, and they would go to the website and chuckle at the information provided there, and that would be it.

The webmaster would write all the content - in many cases, write each page meticulously by hand as its own individual page, and be in charge of all updating of all pages all the time. For large sites, this would involve teams of developers, all working together to get this information put out there. The bigger the site, the more work was required to put it together. This is not to say that websites today do not require any work, or that they’re easy to put together and update, but rather that the process is different with websites today that follow the Web 2.0 strategy.

It used to be that Websites contained very little in the way of interaction other than writing an e-mail to the webmaster. Quickly, public forums became very popular. People could get together and ask questions and receive answers from many people across the world with different experiences, ideas and information. As search and search engines became more sophisticated, people’s search terms went from 1.1 words on average to 2.8, which clearly shows that people are looking for more and more specific information on the web.

What does this mean for Web 2.0?

Because people are becoming more and more used to and reliant on the web as a source of valuable information, it makes sense that people are wanting to share their experiences and knowledge on the web - especially since people like showcasing their knowledge and skills to others! Previously, you might have to create a website for this purpose, but now you have websites such as Wikipedia.org, Google Maps, Flikr and more that allow for user input to fill in gaps in content. This is an exciting opportunity for people to fill in information. Now, when you check out a restaurant or a pet store, you find user reviews on that store to help you decide if you want to go there or not. These things are user generated content, and there is a LOT of it on the web right now, and growing. Take a site like Wikipedia - this whole site is created, expanded and edited by users. Users are doing all the work on this site, the people in charge of it are mostly taking care of maintenance. Yet it is one of the most popular information websites today - the site that a lot of copy-cat sites try to imitate.

Why is it so popular?

We all know that Content is King. And more people creating content for a website is going to generate a whole ton of extra content. This means that you only need to create content that compels the user to add to it, that compels comments. This could be as simple as allowing users to add their reviews of the products you sell on your site. Petco and Petsmart both do this exact feature, as well as other big name brands like Target. The additional content helps them gain relevance on the search engines for their particular products they are trying to promote. Products that are more popular will naturally receive more comments, which will build up the content on those products, which will cause them to be more popular.

We cannot all have information only websites like Flikr and Wikipedia, but we can use those websites to help promote our site. This is something that must be done very carefully, as otherwise your posts will get banned and ignored by users. No one wants to look at spam all day long when they’re looking for real answers. However, if you are patient, you can find information that is relevant to your site, or you can discover that your site is relevant to a question being asked. If your site does NOT answer the question, and you think it should, perhaps you should work on answering the question on your site first and THEN posting.

These are thoughts on how to break in to the powerful tool that is the internet in 2008 - tell us how you are doing it

Never Stop Improving!