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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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