Two of the most popular Web 2.0 interactive elements, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Flash, might be great for customers and a fresh experience on many sites, but they are inherently unfriendly to the major search engine spiders. In my article on Search Engine Land entitled, "The Search Engine Unfriendliness Of Web 2.0" I cover AJAX and Flash in detail, to show you how to prevent these new technologies from harming your ability to get the most out of Web 2.0.

Here are a few quotes from the article that might help those of you who employ AJAX and Flash into your blogs or websites. This next quote covers a great tip about Flash:

Google isn't likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, it's in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as "progressive enhancement," whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.

In this quote, I talk about progressive enhancement's alternative to work with AJAX:

Here, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX application within noscript tags (see TheCleanerMovie.com for an example).

For more tips about how you can incorporate progressive enhancement, feel free to visit my article.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour on the phone with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central, interviewing her just over a week ago. Our discussions ran the gamut of SEO issues -- redirects, duplicate content, AJAX, Flash, PageRank, and of course, the wealth of tools and reports that Google has made available in their Webmaster Central.

The interview has been edited down to 40 minutes and is now available for download:

Download / Listen to the interview » (MP3, 9 megs)

Vanessa will be speaking at two of the upcoming American Marketing Association one-day conferences, titled Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. Her colleague Amanda Camp will be speaking at the other one.

I will be conducting interviews of all the illustrious faculty of search marketers over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to get these podcasts delivered directly to you automatically as they are published.

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These conferences present a unique opportunity to hear -- in a small intimate environment with dozens of delegates instead of hundreds -- the latest tips, tricks, tools, trends and best practices from Googlers Vanessa Fox or Amanda Camp along with search marketing practitioners and gurus Eric Ward, Neil Patel, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Chris Smith (SuperPages.com), Paul O'Brien (HP) to name a few. :-) Oh, and I'll be speaking too, as well as chairing the events.

Mark your calendars: April 20 in San Francisco, May 25 in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago.

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Hope to see you there!