Thu_Feb__7_14:00:07_PST_2019

286 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.