Three Easy Ways to Get Web 2.0

April 25, 2006 —

It's too early to know if Web 2.0 will turn out to be the second-generation Web, or just second-generation Web marketing hype.

Three aspects of many so-called Web 2.0 sites, though, social bookmarking support, tags and user-generated search links, are already proving to be important new trends in Web design. These features use the input of visitors to increase your site's visibility, searchability and browsability.

Social Bookmarking Support

Many websites are adding support for popular social bookmarking services, such as Furl or del.icio.us. With these services, visitors bookmark favorite Internet resources, and then these bookmarks are aggregated to create user-driven indexes to Web content. While this approach is limited in many ways, it is good for creating a dynamic view of what people are currently interested in.

As these sites become more and more popular, it is becoming more and more important to be part of this process, so that your pages will actually show up in these user-generated indexes of what's current and important.

To support this, you can make it easy for people to bookmark your site at whatever social bookmarking site they use by providing bookmarking links on your pages. Some sites are adding text or graphic links to "digg this", for example, or to bookmark pages at Furl, del.icio.us and other sites.

Bookmarking links are easy to create. For most of these services, you just create a URL that passes two parameters to the social bookmarking site, your page's URL and title. This functionality is starting to be incorporated into some content management systems. An example is Sociable, a plug-in for the WordPress open-source content management system.

By supporting social bookmarking services, you increase the likelihood that your site will show up in their indexes, making it easier for people to find the content at your site that they are most likely to be interested in.

Tags

Tags are related to the idea of social bookmarking. Tags are just keywords or phrases that can be associated with web content. Like social bookmarks, tags can be aggregated and used to create user-generated views of what's current and important.

You may have seen tag clouds showing up on Web sites. Tag clouds are blocks of tags, typically arranged in alphabetical order, and weighted by size and/or color so that the most commonly-used tags are emphasized.

By including a tag cloud on your site, you're incorporating a user-driven, weighted index to your content that changes dynamically over time. The tags are typically displayed as links which take visitors to a results page that shows all the content at your site that has been marked with that tag.

The result of this process is that you get a search-engine friendly index to your site that will evolve automatically over time.

There are several ways to incorporate tags into your site. One common approach is to use tag data from third-party Web services, such as Technorati. Another common approach is to develop a custom tagging process, integrated into your site. Tagging is also supported by some Web content management systems.

Top Search Links

Many sites are incorporating top search links into their design. These are links, typically displayed below or next to the search form, that take users to search results pages for the most commonly-used search terms. This feature hasn't received as much attention as tags and social bookmarking, but it's just as important.

By incorporating top search links into your site design, you're giving people a shortcut to the search results they are most likely to be interested in. More importantly, though, is that you're using your visitors' input to create a dynamic index of the content on your site that people are most likely to be searching for.

Not only do these top search links speed navigation for future visitors, but they create a collection of linked search results pages that can boost your search engine visibility on common search terms.

For example, if enough people at your site search for "widgets", this will result in a "widgets" top search link being displayed on your site. The "widgets" result page then gets indexed by search engines, so that web surfers searching for "widgets" can find a page on your site optimized for that term, and linking to the relevant content on your site.

Three Easy Ways to Get Web 2.0

Social bookmark support, tags and top search links may not be the most glamorous features of Web 2.0 sites. But they are some of the most important features to consider incorporating into your site, because they are relatively easy to implement and they let you use the input of your visitors to increase your site's visibility, searchability and browsability.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Thinking Web 2.0

Social bookmarking

Sociable

ITworld.com