Sat Jan 05 21:02:47 PST 2019

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Ensure local engines have your correct street address and place the same address
on multiple pages of your site if you want to do well in local engines.
A few SEM firms focus on helping local, small businesses market their sites in local
search. I believe LocalLaunch and ReachLocal are the two most well-known
companies operating in this space.
One thing worth noting before listing in local databases is that you need to ensure
you build up the authority of your core business domain if you want to rank for
your own brand. If your business is listed in many authoritative local search players
they may outrank you for your own brand name, and you may be stuck paying
some of them for searches for your own brand.
Invisible Tabs
A general search database can only provide a useful search service for a limited
number of search queries. That is why so many vertical search engines exist. They
can afford to buy leads from Google or Yahoo! and then funnel them through the
sales cycle and sell them at a higher price to merchants.
All of the major search engines are also looking to build out their vertical search
offerings. Sometimes at Google you will notice that above the search results they
have links to news, press releases, local search, shopping search, stock quotes,
phone numbers, weather, maps, books, Google Base, and other types of
information. Other times they may provide links to vertical databases, such as blog
search, at the bottom of search results.
Google calls these areas OneBox. Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about this
concept called Searching with Invisible Tabs that helps explain what this technology
does. Essentially, if search engines know enough about you or your query to
assume that a smaller, more specific database will provide better results than the
general database, they will make that selection for you and feature it in the search
results. Search engines are also experimenting with technologies that try to answer
some questions from within the search results page.
Inline Suggest and Query Refinement
Some search engines, such as Google, recommend related and more focused
relevant searches in the search results for broad queries.
When trying to compete in the SERPs, if the broadest queries seem out of reach,
don?t forget to look at related searches that search engines may push people
toward.
New Verticals
When a vertical is new, search engines will desire content so much that they will
underprice or give away leads. Google or YouTube will store your videos free of
charge. Yahoo!?s Terry Semel predicted that within a couple years, video will
become as commonplace on the web as text is.