Short Cuts for Great Google Rankings

Sometimes you just want a short-cut. Sometimes the idea of slogging away for months to reach your goal just doesn't seem worth the effort. Take the woman on the right. My wife just went to Japan and found this "Dancing Cowboy" machine. Designed for people who want to get fit without effort, you don't have to do anything. Sit there, and the machine will shake like a horse and do the exercise for you.

I'm sure theres a lot of people out there who'd like some SEO shortcuts. From an e-mail I got this week:

"4 months to do SEO seems like a long time to do anything. I mean what takes 4 months?"

Wouldn't it be nice if there you could jump ahead of much older and more established sites? Here are five ways to leverage Google's own features to your advantage:

Local

Read more: Click here to list your business in Google local search. There are several people on our forums who've founded their businesses within the last year and have used Google Local to jump ahead of people whose sites have been up since the 1990s.

Videos

Read more: Instructions for running video perfectly in Joomla. Your videos will need to be hosted on YouTube, which is good news because it also solves on hosting / bandwidth costs.

Images

Read more:? Make sure to remove Disallow: /images/ from your site's robots.txt file. Click here to read more about image optimization.

News

Read more: How to get your Joomla site indexed in Google News.

Products

Read more: Make sure your product is on all major sites in your niche. For books, that means Amazon.com, Overstock.com, BarnesandNoble.com. For golf equipment, thats OnlineSports.com, GolfLocker.com etc. Click here for tips on doing this with Virtuemart.

Find Out More

Google's technical name for this move away from simple text results is called "Universal Search" and its been around for around one year now. Yahoo and MSN have their own versions of Universal Search. Ask.com took this further than anyone else with all kinds of search result delivered on one page.

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Your Comments (8)

Kesepian

May 02, 2008

Hi! Great article! Can I ask for you permission to translate this article in Romanian and posting it to my Joomla blog with credits on you? Thank you.
______________
Kesepian.

Steve Burge

May 02, 2008

Hi Kesepian

Sure - that sounds great.

I should get around to putting a proper license on these blog posts. When I do it will be along the lines of "if theres a link back to the original, use whatever you wish".

David Towers

May 02, 2008

Great post Steve! Good to see the Bagpipes video!!!

guido

May 03, 2008

steve, why don't you use creative commons?
there are 6 licences you can choose from
look at creativecommons.com

Steve Burge

May 03, 2008

Thanks Guido - in all likelihood I will. I've seen other bloggers use a Creative Commons Attribution license. Seems like a wise choice...

Steve Burge

May 03, 2008

Consider it done.

Thanks for the push, Guido.

Steve Burge

May 07, 2008

Google has just added another feature to its shortcuts.

This one is a real estate listing and it launched just a couple of weeks ago. I think its going to only keep getting more prominent:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/homes-not-just-homepages.html

Upload listings options are here:
http://base.google.com/base/help/realestate.html

Kyle Ledbetter

May 12, 2008

Had to thank you for this article Steve. My wife just launched an Austin Wedding Planning service (she'll also sell Wedding Websites, of course built in Joomla ) I had totally forgotten to add her to Google local search.