Imagine yourself as an SEO servicing a fairly large client or business. The client has tens of thousands of unique URLs in their domain(s) and more content than you can reasonably shake a magic wand at.  To make matters more complicated, they are getting creamed by their competition under their most important keyword phrases on Google. They want you to turn their situation around and it has to be done within their concept of a reasonable time period.

Your task, while not impossible might certainly look implausible. Taking on and beating an established competitor is a daunting challenge, especially if that competitor has enhanced their search placement through SEO.  Fortunately, you likely have a few newer promotion tools at your disposal some of which your competition might not be using.

In April 2007, Enquisite Search Metrics measured US search referral traffic through the Google network and found that Images, Local and News collectively drove 6.52% of all incoming visitors from Google domains. With Google serving over 4billion search requests each month, 6.52% represents over 613,496,932 search referrals.

Each of these Google venues can often be seen in the general search engine results pages at Google, especially when the search user is signed into one of Google’s membership services such as Gmail or Google Docs. Unfortunately, searching these parts of Google can be time consuming as there are few (if any) automated SEO tools designed to perform competitive searches.

Nevertheless, research is the first step in any SEO campaign. For SEOs, knowing one’s client means knowing their competition. There are a few new steps to competitive research on top of the typical examination of competitors’ sites, SERP placements, link-networks and keyword targets. With new places to promote a client website, many of which are within Google’s network of applications and search technologies, one wants to find which web marketing opportunities the competition is using and which they are not using.

If you find competing websites in News, Maps (local) or Images, study the wording they use in tagging, titling and file-naming. Take a look at how whichever file was found is associated with the competitor’s site and how the file fits into their overall link structure. Now, use your superior SEO skills to out-optimize them.

The easy tying of Google News, Local and Images
Getting a press release or story into Google News can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site in very short order. News results are seen by Google users in several ways. They are often accessed through news.google.com but can also appear as part of general search results under relevant keyword queries. Though searches from news.google.com only generated 0.32% of referrals in Enquisite’s study, a well placed story there is fed to users through RSS feeds, Google Alerts and through external content aggregators.

Getting placement in Google News can be difficult however as they only spider sites that meet their specifications. If you do not have access to a news site or blog that is spidered and listed in Google News, using a press release company such as SEO-PR, PRWeb, or Emediawire, (there are dozens of others as well) is a quick method for content inclusion. While the costs of using a professional release service can run as high as $1000 per release the rewards of having a story appear at just the right time can be enormous. It is important to note, most of the power is in the headline and first paragraphs of the release. Also, many press release firms do not publish hard-links in their copy. It is always wise to write important URLs out in brackets (http://www.pleasedonotcutthisout.com) and to insert the URL of a contacts page towards the bottom of the release. Lastly, include the first few paragraphs of text from the press release on a page in your client’s About or Press page with a link back to the original press release.

Though Local Search is one of the most important areas to get placement in for any sized business, many don’t pay it much attention. Using a placement in Local search for leverage is fairly simple. Include a Google Map on your client’s website explaining how people can find your client’s business location. If your client is a destination business (tourism, accommodation, etc) or a brand-name with multiple locations, inclusion of a Google Map is helpful to site visitors. It is also helpful when thinking of the growing importance of mobile search.

Of all secondary Google search applications, Google Images is the largest driver of search referral traffic with 4.19% of all US results in April 2007. To get placements there, make sure all images are tagged with descriptive Alt tags and the image name corresponds to the strongest keyword target. The page an image resides on and the text surrounding an image also have an effect on Google’s interpretation of that image. General SEO rules apply.  When applying a link (or treating a pre-existing link) against an image on a client site, SEOs tend to place a text-link directly below it in order to guarantee a spider will properly follow it. Be sure that link is keyword descriptive and includes a unique title tag. Lastly, if possible include images or thumbnails of site images in your html sitemap with corresponding text-based links beside those images.

Google’s ability to incorporate references from its vertical search tools into general (or universalized) results is one of its greatest strengths. Each of Google’s verticals presents opportunities for SEOs to further increase relevant traffic to client sites. The trick is tying them together with creative and user-experience enhancing links.