We look at some of the new trends and ways SEO is evolving in this Web 2.0 environment, and how marketers in Asia will need to start embracing these key strategies moving forward.

It's increasingly a Web 2.0 world, and this is starting to have a significant impact on how you should approach your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts either in your home country or abroad. With new times comes new strategies, some of which can really add a needed boost to your SEO programme.    

A successful SEO strategy traditionally revolves around a few key areas: a focus on what keywords you want to target, developing topical content that best supports these keywords, ensuring your site from a technical standpoint is readable by the search engines, and harnessing a solid number of quaility backlinks so that the search engines know you're a real player. Of course, there are a number of other elements that will go into your strategy, but these four are almost always the starting points.  

The term Web 2.0 refers to a new version of the World Wide Web, a version aimed at facilitating creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users, according to a Wikipedia entry. These concepts have led to the development of web-based communities such as social networking sites, wikis and blogs among others. 

From Web 2.0 to SEO 2.0
Through revisiting the basic strategies of SEO and in combining these concepts to the essence of what Web 2.0 is, we now emerge with a more sophisticated and contemporary application of SEO that we can call SEO 2.0. So, as the web produces new ways to present revitalised content, so too must your SEO strategy evolve. In its new form, SEO 2.0 focuses on how to first acknowledge and then, creatively leverages these new technologies into your SEO programme, ensuring visibility for your brand in this competitive arena.

Below are some key areas that have been helping to define the SEO 2.0 landscape.

Blogs & wikis
These particular forms of content management systems that drive right to the heart of Web 2.0, are all about user generated content and are primed and relatively optimal for search engine visibility from the get go. Google, in particular, seems to react favourably to blogs and wikis because there are certain elements inherent to these that are naturally search engine opitmised -- they're textually rich, extensively interlinked, frequently updated and rooted in semantic markup.

To take advantage of these new technologies, companies are either starting their own corporate blog or targeting certain pages and adding a user-generated section such as transforming a glossary page into a wiki. However, for these ideas to be truly sucessful in translating into higher rankings, you're going to have to let go of a bit of control to allow your audience to help drive your online business. 

Social networking & tagging
The idea here is that the social networks act in a way similar to that of search engines -- ensuring the most relevant content rises to the top. And in terms of SEO, content is always king. So, on sites like Digg, it means having enough votes from the community to make your news article number one, and on sites like MySpace, the measure of your popularity is based on how many friends you can get in your community.

For your site to benefit from the SEO effects in this Web 2.0 world, you'll need to create a social profile with meaningful content that gets frequently contributed to and then, simply link back to your corporate pages with topical keywords that are properly tagged.

Video, images and PDFs
More and more now, you'll see other content elements such as video, image and Portable Format Format (PDF) ranking for terms you might query in. This is a result from the search engines' stride for continual intelligence and thinking that information is not limited to simple HTML pages, but spans across many different forms.

Users' search for images in 2007 accounted for 16 percent of total searches worldwide, according to a recent ClickZ article. Moreover, a Pew Internet & American Life Project in their report says that 57 percent of internet users globally have watched or downloaded a video online. PDF images are increasingly finding their way into the search engines as well.

All of the above areas are beginning to wrap into a bigger application, mostly driven by Google called Universal Search. In this system, Google blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book engines among those from its traditional web page listings into an all-in-one information platform for its users. Bringing it back to SEO, this makes a strong case for marketers to pay more attention to these 'other' content applications -- images, video, news -- and utilise these to build a formidible SEO strategy moving forward.

Taking it back home to Asia, we've seen firsthand, these new SEO 2.0 concepts appear in increasing waves. Japan, as you know, constitutes approximately 40 percent of all blog posts worldwide, and at 18 percent, comprises the highest access worldwide to YouTube. For a lot of our clients in Japan, we've seen them effectively leverage the power of these highly visited blogs into a solid link strategy that has produced successful performance in terms of SEO results. Also, regular contributions to vertical specific wikis and even the creation of their own wikipedia pages have seen good performance.

Also, Korea, at 55 percent, is the most socially connected country on the planet, with more users accessing social networking than any other country on the globe, according to a 2007 report by Ipsos Insight. Like Korea, China has also become quite strong recently in the social networking sphere. This has led to marketers becoming smarter on how they're utilising these channels to postively influence their SEO efforts, again through strategic tagging of an SNS site, link backing from alpha bloggers, and tactical and frequent entries in the local wikis.

SEO has always been a strong driver of online marketing success whether you're in the U.S., Germany or Japan, and when coupled with some of the new concepts of Web 2.0, these make an even more potent weapon in your online arsenal. So, as you think about making updates to your existing SEO programme, or are just starting to lay the groundwork for the first time, pay attention to what's happening in the Web 2.0 arena -- wikis, blogs, social networking, videos -- and look for ways to leverage these into your SEO activities. You should start to see good success moving forward.

Andy Radovic is senior online marketing and SEO consultant of Sozon.