Most web owners check their rankings in Google and Yahoo! as an indication of how well their SEO strategies are working. There are however another five Google properties that could be used to deliver traffic. In fact, ranking in the top three or four in one of these could be easier than ranking highly Google’s general search.

Web Pro News published a comprehensive article on the different properties and how to rank well in them. Here is a brief overview of each of those properties that you should consider:

YouTube: believe it or not, YouTube is the second largest search engine in use today – we all know who is number one. Create good quality and well optimized videos and, if you can rank well for those search terms, you will find traffic flowing from YouTube as well. Using well optimized videos that you have stored on YouTube may well help your overall SEO as well.

Google Images: in much the same way that videos can deliver traffic, so to can images. Well optimized alt tags can help your images rank well for image searches.

Google News: perhaps not for everyone, however online news is rapidly overtaking the print media as the number one source for news. Can you publish a daily news article? If so, ranking well in Google News could deliver a steady stream of traffic.

Google Maps and Local Search: for many businesses having a restricted trading area, Local Search is a must and should be your primary target. This may well include optimizing suburbs, towns or regions within your keyword structure.

Google Blog Search: probably forgotten by most web site owners. If you include a blog then having that blog rank highly in Blog Search may also deliver a flow of traffic.

Put three or four of those together and you may find your site receiving a steady flow of extra traffic. Of course, once you have optimized for each of Google’s properties, you could also look at Yahoo! and MSN to see if they have any properties worth optimizing for as well. Your SEO strategies should go beyond the basic search engines – there is traffic to be gained from so many other places.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 am and is filed under Local Search, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.