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April 12, 2006 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Search Engine Optimization:
High Rankings with Vertical Search
 Achieving a number one position in the organic search listings at the major search engines increasingly means being listed in the vertical search results. Vertical search results are specialty search listings that appear at the top of the regular search results when the search engines interpret a search query as related to news, shopping, local, recipes, automotive or real estate, pushing the regular listings further down the page. The primary reason for showing those vertical results is to improve search relevancy. Business owners and online marketers must pay attention to the vertical results and try to understand what it takes to be in those listings.
Vertical Search Results
Google calls the vertical results OneBox results, Yahoo calls those Shortcuts, AOL Snapshots and Ask Smart Search. At Google vertical search results appear in two formats: as OneBox results or as Google Base results with drop down options. A search for "George Bush" brings up to the top three news links from Google's news search engine. Another search for "digital camera" shows the top-3 OneBox results from Froogle, Google's free shopping comparison engine.
A search for "homes for sale" on the other hand brings up a totally different type of result. This time we see a selection option box that gives the user the option to refine a search result by specifying a location, property type and listing type. It then calls up appropriate real estate properties. A search for "cars for sale" shows the same box, but now the user is prompted to enter a location (country and zip code), make and condition of the car (new or used) to refine the search. The search results show a complete car listing that best matched the search criteria. Need a recipe? Enter "recipes" in the search box and Google let you narrow down your search to cuisine type and main ingredient before displaying the results.
Google Base
Google Base is a database engine Google released in November last year. With this service Google wants to accept content of all types allowing the public to build a large classified ad or content database that they later can use to feed specialty search engines for travel, recipes, jobs, a personal profile, among other things.
Right now Google Base has still very few listings in the main categories such as real estate. But this can change quickly when people start to realize that being in the vertical results can lead to more visibility in Google's organic search results.
Google Base can potentially have major implications for every business that publishes structured data, such as classified listings, travel information and product listings. This includes players such as Craigslist, eBay, Microsoft's online classified search engine Live Expo, online classified search engines such as SimplyHired.com, Oodle.com, Indeed.com, but most of all newspaper classified.
Take Advantage of Vertical Search
Understanding the implications of vertical search results, how it works and how to get listed in those results, presents business owners, and right now, especially online merchants and real estate people, with a unique opportunity. As particular content types grow over time expect Google to start showing results for those types as well.
How do you show up in the top vertical search results? Google Base is fairly new and still in beta test so more research and experimentation will be needed to get a better feel for what exactly is required to get listed at the top of those results. Each vertical search engine has its own specific algorithms to show the most relevant results and those algorithms are changing regularly. But for now it is safe to say that submitting or feeding optimized content into Google Base is your best bet. That means doing the keyword research and writing compelling keyword-rich titles and descriptions.
Content can be entered into Google Base one-by-one in the form of individual postings and involves a number of steps. If you have more than 10 items you can create a product feed to upload your material directly into the Google Base database. Products that are fed into Google Base are also listed in Froogle, Google's free shopping comparison engine.
Now is the time to start feeding product and service description data into the Google Base database because when your business content is listed in the vertical search results your content has a better change of being found.
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