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It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.
Which engines besides web search do you see big traffic from? Comment.
Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.
1. Ranking in YouTube
As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.
A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:
- An accurate and descriptive title
- Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.
- Descriptive keyword tags
- Avoid keyword stuffing
It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:
- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags
- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.
- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.
- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.
- Encourage participation by enabling everything.
- use meta data
- use captions and subtitles
- use watermarks
- use Google Maps integration
There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.
More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.
2. Ranking in Google Image Search
Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":
- Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.
The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:
More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.
3. Ranking in Google News
Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:
- Only indexes articles three days old or less
- Only indexes it once
- Read Google News Help for Publishers
- Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it
- Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)
- Host "most popular" and "breaking news" sections on your site
- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description
Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.
More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.
4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search
While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.
For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”, “Music, Nicholasville KY”, and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:
- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less
- Local Groupings
There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:
- have pages, mentioning your area of service
- your phone number
- your physical address
- directions on how to reach your office
- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)
- have links pointing to you from local websites and directories
- have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)
- have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)
Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.
More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.
5. Ranking in Google Blog Search
Back in ’07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:
- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank
Some negatives he mentioned:
- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site
ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.
More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.
Wrap Up
It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.
Which of these do you see the most traffic from? Tell WPN Readers.
Got more tips for ranking with these engines? Share your knowledge.
Great examples of there being more than one way to skin the Google cat. Have seen a lot of sites do very well in gaining traffic from Google’s image search. Whether it be Google or any other form of traffic generation, you need to cast a broad net and not focus too much on any one specific source.
While I login my Google webmaster tool, I can see Google image search crawler tool. Basically, I think we don’t need to manually add images into google. When your page are indexed well by google, your images on these pages are indexed well by Google image too.
It is something we have been delving into and what i find interesting was the consistency point on the blog search. Meaning you would think if you added article at regular intervals ie. 1 a day. this would be a positive. I assume then that google sees this as rather unnatural . Nice Post
Thank you for your informative and insightful post. I always follow your posts and I am learning so much – traffic is such a challenge and after implementing many of your suggestions I am seeing a steady increase in the amount of visitors to my site and blog.
You can forget how powerful YouTube is. Thanks for reminding me. As far as image search, sometimes our highest ranking keywords are from images. No wonder why those celeb sites do so well.
Poor understanding of English, but translation of the article and did want to say: your article is very good.
As usual Chris,
You’ve got another great post with useful info!
I don’t know much about youtube other than online videos, perhaps I need to do some homework on the SEO benefits of it.
There are numerous tips floating around in webmaster circles about how to improve your ranking in search engine results on Google. If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT tags, now is a good time to add ALT tags. Google apparently indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images.
I always forget about YouTube. Thanks for the reminder Chris. I really like the tip on adding ‘video’ to the title. Like you said, people will search keywords with the word video in it. Thanks!
Descriptive titles for Youtube videos are a must. I try to look up videos first of similar events, and see which ones get the most hits and what their titles are before putting mine in. Plus, I add my video as a response to something similar with the most amount of traffic for even more visibility.
~ Kristi
Local search is gaining in popularity so this is helpful informaiton. Now that You Tube is a part of the Google network I think the site is going to be even more powerful for marketing. Great advice here. Thanks for that.
One of my sites recieves a good sizeable amount of traffic from google images. I do use alt tags, but I also think it is due sites topic.
I found that the youtube.com information interesting. My videos will need a little tuning to increase traction. Thanks for the info
On know on YouTube.com, if you select the “Director’s” option, it allows you to prominently display your URL. Along with a strong description, this can easily contribute to your ranking success. Nice article, kudos!
thanks for the article i bookmarked it as I am using some of the info. great stuff.
70 percent of traffic to a past client was coming from google images. So it works!!
Using local modifiers are especially useful to how people in your area find you. For example if your town has a nickname chances are some people will be using it to do a search. It can be helpful to include that nickname in your content.
Interesting stuff on Google news – must look into that some more as it’s not an angle I had really considered very seriously before. Nice revelation.
I translate some of the post in my blog
http://www.seomarketing.co.il/2009/04/seo-not-in-google-se/
I added 2 links to this post from my post.
Thank a lot for a useful information
Etgar
Good tips. This was some of the most exacting info I have read on images and search engines. Thanks for the other stuff as well!
Hi Chris,
This is an excellent article. I addressed a couple of these things for Local Search in my video on http://www.foleyinternetmarketing.com/local_marketing.html.
I have bookmarked this page on Delicious.
Will get on to it right now
I have a site new last October. I’ve been reading all your articles and I’ve gained a lot of knowledge on SEO. I’ve paid for professional help, it doesn’t seem to help. Now I’m going at it alone. Thanks for all the articles and help. Pat
I discovered by accident a couple years ago that I was getting a lot of traffic from Google images and have since made sure to optimize my alt tags as much as possible.
Great Youtube info too.
Good comments Chris. But just like improving rankings for a website there are many tricks most people don’t know about. Include a photo and your site we’ll jump forward. Include a video and you site we’ll jump even further forward. And of course, the grand daddy of tricks…….
Ooo what an nice article! Loved the new ranking tips whit YouTube!
Nice work
Thanks Chris for the great info. I know for me, sometimes I get so focused on ranking in Google search that I forget all the other ways to skin a cat.
Everyone including me get so much carried away with ranking on Google only to forget the significance of much potential areas across searches. The strategy after all, as you mentioned, is visiblity. So why not remind ourselves to optimize our efforts (besides the sites) in reaching the optimum results on the web??!!
Thanks for posting such useful content. I especially liked the explanation of how images and webpages can be optimized for google image search. I think this may be an area that is overlooked by a lot of website owners.
Thanks for all these practical, doable tips to improve Google rankings. This is really useful stuff, Chris. Still a lot I haven’t been implementing.
just finished reading the tips, all i have to say is… this is real smart tricks and tips, i don’t realize if we can got good traffic from google maps, i want to give it a try