Being The Big Fish – Vertical Search Engines

Search is changing, and isn’t just about text any more. Images and video are being targeted for vertical search engines, and still not as competitive as traditional methods.

As long as you optimize your graphics properly, there is no reason you should not be able to get multiple rankings across major search engines by ranking highly for text, local, and image and video results. Ranking a video high on YouTube can mean increased traffic from targeted consumers who search for verticals. So can local search – it is simply amazing that more companies do NOT optimize for this still non competitive field.

The main thing to remember is to stay specific and stay consistent. You have to maintain a realistic flow between your different possible results to be taken seriously by consumers, so make sure the level of professionalism is maintained across the board.

You can take almost any hopeful keyword phrase and optimize for it in a variety of ways to show up in advanced search results. Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, regular articles and blog posts and comments on major forums; you can posts pictures with proper tags and videos with relevant surrounding text.

Dates can be relevant as well – if you think future searchers could benefit from information specific by date, make sure you note that for news items and current events / press releases, etc. Don’t forget that seasonal things can ebb and flow with traffic as well.

Don’t be caught up in the hype of over optimization or formulas; while you want to optimize every opportunity, sometimes a forced message is worse than no message at all. You want all of your available content to be of the highest quality possible, so make sure if you are going to say something that you have something to say.

Do try to cover all your bases, however, and look for small circulation online journals, etc – the small niche ones that have a relatively small but dead loyal supporters can actually be more lucrative from a traffic standpoint than a huge blog with thousands of on again off again readers in a major category.

Once you have figured out what vertical engines can benefit you the most, run a smart campaign to dominate your niche there – remember, 100% of 100 searches a month beats 1% of 1,000 searches a month! If you can manage to corner your niche market in a small pond, you can be the big fish.