Remember when SEO was as simple as add good title tags, stuff your meta tags and page content with keywords and create a door way page and let the engines move you up and up. Well those days are long gone. Many of the techniques we used back in the 1996 infancy of the Internet not only do not work well any more, but most are now considered “black hat”. Just as SEO has changed to a more complex game, of specialized content, RSS feeds, social search, strategic link building and more, so has web development. There are several reasons web design and development has grown, but the most significant reason is how much more accessible the web is today. There has been the wireless revolution such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, and even computer screens in automobiles, now come equipped with access to the internet and email.

Now we have web 2.0, which uses all the aspects of social search, RSS feeds and the new kid on the block AJAX, which is a process to combine multiple programming languages. In addition, web sites are now powered by databases and XML files which can change certain parts of a web page without reloading the entire page. This brings its own new challenges to SEO, where a single URL can now display different content all the time. It is like reverse duplicate content. This makes it very hard for a search engine to index a page with content, where the page very rarely will look the same. It also brings the problem of one page web sites. Just like Flash is an SEO challenge because content can not be indexed, Ajax has a similar, issue. The difference between flash and Ajax is that Ajax uses XHTML, and its content can at least be recognized by the search engines, its links can be followed and its alt tags can be read.

These new techniques in web development have great advantages for users. However, their are significant drawbacks as well that developer really need to think about, especially those who are not savvy to the ways of search. The drawbacks are that it can sometimes inhibit the use of the back button on the web browser, and sometimes the code has a problem initiating the response that it has been programmed to produce.