Web 2.0 generates a lot of content. In fact one of the memes of Web 2.0 is “Let the users create your content.” It is my philosophy that making this content search engine indexable is in your best interests.

Opening up your content to search engines is not only extremely beneficial to the online populous (and your existing users), it also attracts new users that you would never have been able to reach.

Let’s look at some simple techniques that you can easily integrate into your web application.

Note: Not all of these are applicable to all web applications. In fact some web-apps are not conducive to SEO at all. For example, Mint (an online money-management tool) would be very hard to open up to search engines because its “content” is sensitive financial information.

Public Content

First and foremost, open up your content. Your site can’t be indexed if all of your information is encapsulated in a walled garden. Opening up your content will allow you to benefit from the wealth of information that your users create. You will gain search hits from what is known as the long-tail of Internet search.

Try browsing your application as a guest. Is your site usable if you are not logged in? If the answer is no, try rethinking your structure to make your content accessible to logged-out users.

Good Titles

One of the easiest and most important things that you can do to improve your rankings is making sure your pages have good titles that match your content.

Search engines highly value keywords in the title so think about what title will accurately and helpfully describe the content of your page.

Rewrite URLs

Using Apache’s mod_rewrite in your web application can be a useful tool. Not only do search engines highly value keywords in URLs but it also gives your links better anchor-text.

Plus, you will get your site more thoroughly indexed using mod_rewrite. Spiders oftentimes ignore URLs with long variable strings. A search engine may end up only indexing a few articles from a site because it doesn’t know which variables are relevant.

Several sites use mod_rewrite to achieve fantastic search engine results. Among them are Digg and Wikipedia which have become ubiquitous in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Semantics

Be sure to properly markup your pages to highlight important information. Use of the header tags (<h1> through<h6>) are helpful because they let search engines know what is important and what isn’t.But don’t overdue it. For example, it would be an unwise decision to do a find and replace as you serve pages to surround specific keywords with <h1> tags as this likely be penalized as spam by search engines.

Well-Anchored Links

Similarly, look through your application and see what kind of anchor text you are using. Try to replace any “Click Here” or “Read” links with more descriptive anchor text (like the subject or title of the linked-page). Search engines love well-anchored links and will reward the effort.

Link Baiting

Finally, try to think of ways to give your users incentive to link back to your pages. Social news sites are the champions of this. They give you something to gloat to your users about. If a site is dugg to the homepage they oftentimes link to the Digg article (or submit one and link to it in hopes that it will get to the frontpage and bring in traffic).

Link-baiting can be anything from encouraging users to link back to your site (eg. YouTube gives you embed links for their videos) to running a contest. It’s getting your users do your link-building in addition to having them create your content.

Conclusion

Using these techniques to search engine optimize your Web 2.0 application should greatly increase your traffic, your signups, and your revenue. Let us know any other tips you’ve run across in the comments.

In the Summer of 2007, I was running a hobby site about wakeboarding. I was experimenting with various Search Engine Optimization and Link Building techniques, and in the course of my research I read a lot about article submission as a link-building tool.

The basic premise is this: you write (or hire someone to write) an article and then submit it to an article directory or get another website to publish it. At the end of the article is a link back to your website which will bring in traffic and help boost your search engine rankings.

I’m not a fan of article directories so I started looking for a related website that would let me guest-write an article for them. After a few days, I found a high-ranking, popular, highly-related website that was looking to expand their wakeboarding tutorials section.

I got in contact with the webmaster and he was enthusiastic about letting me do an article for him. So we worked out the details (topic, audience, length, etc).

At this same time I was still reading about how popular content-sites were run and found that a large number of them outsource some or all of their writing.

It was nearing the time of year where I would be returning to school, so I wasn’t going to have much time to write new articles for the site. I figured that paying someone to write some articles in my absence would be a good way to keep the site fresh. But I didn’t have a need for it quite yet, so I had decided I’d wait until I needed a writer to try it out.

When the website admin and I finished working out the details of the guest-writing deal, I was on vacation in Florida. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and try out an article writing service.

I am a member of DigitalPoint forums, and have done some business in their marketplace before, so that seemed like a logical place to start. I posted a thread with what I was looking for and within an hour I had a few people send me messages with writing samples and their pricing.

I was astounded by the low prices. How these people could get by charging two or three dollars per article baffled me.

Price wasn’t too much of a consideration for me since I was only buying a single article. So I chose the candidate with the best writing sample. His rate was $6 for a 500 word article.

I was pretty excited about this deal because the writing sample was so good and because his rates were so cheap. Had the result been as good as the samples it would have been very profitable to outsource all of my writing (because the hour it takes me to write a good article for that site is worth a heck-of-a-lot more to me than $6).

Anyway, I gave him the details of the assignment and pointed him to several resources that contained all the information he would need. This included an article I had previously written for my own site on almost exactly the same topic.

After a few days, he sent me this:
(apologies for the image, I don’t want this indexed)

Obviously I couldn’t use this for anything. But I paid him anyway because a) it was only $6 and b) I figured I’d be able to use it later in an article about outsourcing.

Moral of the story: only outsource to people you can trust. Luckily, I learned this lesson inexpensively. But it could have been a much more costly mistake.

When most people think of outsourcing, the knee-jerk reaction is “outsourcing bad.” I know that I, for one, have had horrible experiences with Indian tech support and cheaply-manufactured Chinese goods. And the media has had its hand in shaping our connotations of outsourcing. But this isn’t really what I am addressing here.

While I do know some entrepreneurs who have coders in India who will work for pennies on the dollar, I have always found that you get what you pay for. I have tried outsourcing simple work to India in the past and the result was sheer frustration, wasted time, and nothing to show for it. Looking back on this experience, it was actually pretty comical.

No, what I’d like to focus on here is outsourcing to other small businesses or individuals.

It can be very advantageous, both time-wise, result-wise, and money-wise to outsource. Let’s face it, we can’t be good at everything. You have your bread and butter (which better be the product you’re putting out) and then you have all these extraneous things that are necessary to do business but aren’t your primary focus.

At Professionile, that means design. I am a programmer, and as much as I would like to think I’m a good designer, there comes a time where I just have to admit to myself that design is not my forte. And it isn’t yet economical to hire a full-time designer.

Here’s the way I look at it: I do freelance web development at $50 an hour (average). Over the last few years I have had the privilege of meeting a handful of really great designers on the web and through work. I know that even if I could put out the same quality of work as they do that it would take me much longer (let’s say twice as long). And I also know from past experience that I can hire them for somewhere in the range of $35 per hour.

Using the above figures, for every two hours I choose to do design work over web development work, I forego $100 and I could have gotten the end result for $35 (because if you’ll remember, the professional designer can work two times faster than I). So for every 2 hours I spend designing, I lose $65.

If you’ve ever taken an economics class, you’ll recognize that the term for what I’ve just described is competitive advantage. The designer has a competitive advantage over me in design. And therefore, it is beneficial for me to trade (or outsource as the case may be).

And this is exactly what I’ve been doing. I built into my budget for Professionile certain design expenses, and then outsourced the design to designer-friends of mine. It has been a win-win situation. And the designs have exceeded my expectations (check out our new logo). Competitive advantage is something that should always be foremost in your mind as an entrepreneur. Sometimes it is beneficial to outsource.

Many, scared by what information others may find about them, have struggled to expunge the record of their Internet existence.

But the omnipotence of the Internet can be used as a tool. Controlling your online-identity can be an important asset. That is what Professionile is about, using the Internet as a tool to improve your career.

Professionile is self-promotion 2.0.