Anyone making use of SEO wants to take it to the
next level. SEO, or search engine optimization, can be seen as something of an
arms race. Almost anyone with a website is trying to leverage SEO to beat the
competition. However, one of the problems comes from the fact that the tools
are fairly standardized at this point. One might think of it as someone trying
to win a race against people who are perfectly in sync with them. The winner
tends to be more about luck in those instances than skill. That’s because
everyone is starting from roughly the same place and moving at the same pace.
This is the case with many SEO techniques as well.
To be sure, using SEO is an absolute necessity at
this point. SEO is how one gets in line with everyone else who’s competing for
the top spots in the search engines. However, one also needs to look for
powerful new SEO techniques in order to get a real advantage over the
competition. This is where the best SEO agencies really shine. The main thing
they bring to the table are new techniques which their competitors don’t or
can’t use. For example, consider the case of structured data in SEO.
Structured data is itself one of the less widely
known techniques for SEO. This is due to the fact that it’s still fairly new in
the greater scheme of things. Or, rather, it might be better to say that the
modern form of it is distinct from structured data in the past. Today
structured data is a markup language unto itself. In the past people used basic
keyword stuffing to try to push ahead of the competition. Today’s structured
data is similar in one respect. Structured data helps to effectively bridge the
language barrier between website content and search engine.
A search engine can’t really understand the
written word in the same way a human might. More advanced scrapers can often
get the general gist of a site’s contents. Natural language processing, or NLP,
has advanced quite a bit over the years. This technique uses powerful
artificial intelligence based techniques to give programs a rough idea of tone
or subject matter when given written data. However, it’s still a fairly
ineffective way of describing a site’s content. This is where structured data
comes into the picture. It’s essentially a quick blurb written with data and
syntax which is easier for search engines to understand. It’s an immensely
effective way of boosting one’s ranking in search engines. But it becomes even
more powerful when combined with schema markup.
36.6% of the top results on a search engine will
use structured data generated by schema markup. Meanwhile only 0.3% of websites
as a whole make use of it. One can compare these numbers to see just how much
of a boost schema markup gives over the
competition. There’s good reason why the best SEO agencies use schema markup.
Basic structured data is essentially similar to how websites were created in
the late 90s. The data is effective, but static. Todays websites use
dynamically generated content so that it can change in response to new updates.
However, standard structured data isn’t able to do this. Schema markup brings
structured data into a modern context. It means that one can essentially use
the same underlying database driven technologies for structured data as the
website itself uses.
All of this suggests one very important point.
Getting ahead on today’s web means using the newest and most powerful SEO based
techniques. The best SEO companies use new systems like schema markup. And in
doing so these companies are able to get great results for their clients.
