Metamend was founded in the late 90’s. That’s around the time when I started my career in search marketing. Back then, websites could be thought of as fairly linier environments where INDEX (or HOME) would be the top of a two or three level pyramid of pages. Content was relatively static and the search engines acted almost predictably.

Most small business owners working with SEOs considered their websites to act like electronic brochures. The E-entrepreneurial types opened online versions of their brick-and-mortar stores and the especially crafty started vast affiliate programs. For almost ten years, the web was wild.

Two years ago broadband access became the common home standard in the United States. That’s when the web became truly interactive and the days of the simple brochure website as an effective tool for small businesses and their search marketers were numbered.

Though the average small business website has become more sophisticated, the basic content / design philosophies of website as electronic brochure have not changed. A great deal of what is considered web design best practices comes from that time and many websites still seem stuck between then and the point two years ago when the nature of the web started to change.

We are on a push to get our small and medium sized business clients to think about other search related venues into which they might place their commercial content. Internet user habits are shifting towards using alternative tools other than traditional search engines to find information. Image search, map search and social networking searches are increasingly being used by searchers as they become used to an increasing number of verticals.

There are a few simple SEO techniques and a number of complicated ideas we’re recommending to clients with brochure-like sites when thinking about getting their information in front of mass viewers’ eyes.

The first of the two easiest techniques are the addition of a Google, Ask, MSN or Yahoo map to your contact page along with full address information. The other is to tag each image with a short but highly descriptive ALT tag and a keyword-rich file-name. Both steps give your site a better chance of being found in image searches.

Our more complicated advice involves establishing business and professional profiles in social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. We’re even recommending some clients produce their own YouTube videos which we can work with to craft a wider marketing campaign based on some of the new methods of search.

Ten years ago, websites were relatively static. The Web2.0 era has been more one of transition than definition but it is leading the web environment to where ever it is going in the coming years. Today’s website is not a brochure at a single domain. It is more dynamic than that and can actually stretch over several domains, drawing information from several different servers.

The one thing we do know is that small to medium sized businesses tend to be falling behind when it comes to using the emerging search media as well as their larger competitors.