Let’s face it, the internet has completely changed any definition of “marketing” that we have ever known. In fact most small businesses are struggling to figure out how this whole “promoting my business” works today. Do you ever feel frustrated about trying to make a name online? Do you feel like the competition is overwhelming? Is there a solution out there? The key lies in implementing good search marketing techniques.
There are many reasons why quality reputation based marketing should be a high priority mission for your business. Reaching more potential customers can produce more sales, higher profits and ultimately create a good reputation. Over time your company’s good reputation will keep bringing more and more customers.
Implementing good Internet search marketing may at first seem like a difficult and complicated thing to do. In reality though, it’s not that difficult, if you first take the time to understand how this type of marketing works.
Though, if you’re in a hurry and want professional help and results now, get in touch and let us help you. It will probably save you a few years of trial & error.
Search marketing, the old and the new
In essence, search marketing is a term that covers certain methods and ways to increase a website’s “organic traffic. That simply means to improve your website standing in such a way that the search engines send you more people, for free. Although banners, ads and similar advertising bring traffic as well, search marketing is the only way to build long-term streams of free traffic.
Old School SEO Data
It used to be that search engine optimization (SEO) was primarily about setting your meta keywords, trying to use a few relevant keywords throughout the content, a few headings, and defining your title tag. In essence, this was how you let the search engine know what your site is about.
- Title tags – The title tag of a website is probably one of the most important components of SEO optimization. A title tag describes the content of the page. That description appears on browsers and tabs as well as on search engine results. The title tag description will also be visible when external websites, such as social media, link to your web page.
- Meta tags – Meta tags are used to provide search engines with more information about a website. Such elements could be a short description of the website or the site’s language. Important meta tags are also keywords that would help people find your web page. There are many more kinds of meta tags, but only those offering relevant information to the search engines are actually useful.
- Meta description – The meta description is a short summary of the website or a specific web page that’s a part of it. Meta descriptions are visible when your web page shows up in search results, just below the web page’s title labeled with the title tag. A good meta description should provide a short description about the web page, but it should be no more than 150-160 characters in length.
- Page content – The text, images, videos or sounds on your website all represent the content of your website and the pages within it. The page content, of course, should be of outstanding quality and high value. The thing about page content that matters most in terms of SEO is that the content is optimized and link-worthy. No matter how relevant and superb, your page content would be useless if no one can find it.
SEO has a gotten a bit more complex, meet microdata
Search engines have evolved to be more useful for their users by differentiating content and websites. They want to recognize if a page is a review, an event, if it applies to a certain locality, if its about an organization or a personal blog. To help them do this, search engines these days are looking for more evolved and more nuanced metadata on your part.
Microdata is a method for nesting this aforementioned metadata within web pages. Using microdata helps structure the crucial information about your website in a more precise way. This makes it way easier for search engines, browsers and web crawlers to classify the data in order to produce better search results.
Microdata needn’t be used in place of traditional SEO techniques, but rather alongside them. Schema.org is a website where you can find ready-made sets of metadata types to fit your particular website format. These sets of specific metadata types are called schemas.
- Organization: Organization schemas are used for schools, corporations, government organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Schemas help organizations sort data like contact information, address or associated departments for better search results.
- Events: The set of metadata used for events is convenient for occurrences such as concerts, festivals, lectures. Specific metadata for events is practical because it can provide search engines with enough information about the events. The information could be about the time, location, organization, performers, even sub-events if the event is a part of a bigger happening.
- Place or business: Schemas of this kind can be of use to physical businesses as well as e-commerce companies. These schemas will give information about the type of place or business, whether it’s an online store, a restaurant or a shopping center.
- Product or offer: The microdata schemas for products and offers serve to improve the way their details or availability are delivered to potential customers.
- Person: These schemas can be used for portfolios, biographies, fan websites or any kind of a web page devoted to a person.
- Creative works: These are individual metadata sets for websites displaying many kinds of creative work. There are separate schemas for websites dedicated to books, music, movies, TV series or even recipes.
- Embedded objects: Basically, embedded objects are all things that are not text. Therefore, there are sets of metadata for optimizing websites that display images or galleries, audio objects and videos.
- Health or medicine: These metadata schemas offer many sub-types, depending on the type of the website. There are special schemas for nesting info about different conditions, symptoms, risk factors, therapies, devices, studies, diets, supplements, anatomy and more.
Does microdata confuse and overwhelm you?
What you need to understand is the following: SEO has just gotten a lot more complex. Whereas old SEO was about just keywords and a few other types of “seo data”, new SEO requires you to feed a lot more information to the search engine. That is, if you want optimal results. You can spend a couple of years trying to understand SEO, or you can get faster results, by talking to the professionals. It’s your choice.
Search marketing benefits
To do marketing is really to just compete for people’s attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re running an e-commerce website or a website whose sole intention is to promote your organization or business. Everybody is vying for clients’ attention and you must do everything in your power to rise above the competition.
There’s nothing like optimizing your website to be listed in organic search results. When done right, the results from your SEO work can stand as proof of your site’s quality and bring even more visits.
You can optimize your site and do SEO yourself, hire a team of professionals to do it, or even arrange for paid search engine inclusion. However, you must remember that good and proper search marketing is the key to getting more visits, regular clients and more sales.
