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Thursday Shopping and Media Search

These highly specialized segments of search are being built out as the major engines fol-

low the trends of available media and website owner practices and preferences. Unlike

the niche directories you looked into last month, the specialty search you’ll work on

today can be found predominantly as components of the major search engines. They

include the following:

Shopping search

Sites such as Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, not to men-

tion large shopping engines such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com, allow merchandisers

to submit frequent updates of product details and prices.

Image search

Sites such as

http://images.google.com

and

http://search.yahoo.com/images

allow you to search strictly for images. If one of your

site’s differentiating factors is its images, don’t overlook image search as a way to snag

some targeted visitors. Depending on the search engine, optimizing for image search

may involve writing optimized image ALT tags and adding keyword-rich text immedi-

ately surrounding your images.

Video search

Upload your video, set up your feed, or wait to be crawled! Any way

you slice it, video search is taking shape at sites like

http://video.google.com

and

http://video.yahoo.com

, not to mention media search sites like

singingfish.com

. Since

video in general is difficult for search engines to crawl, some video search engines are

currently giving site owners an uncharacteristically high level of control over submit-

ting, including metadata that you can include in video-specific

RSS

tags (we’ll talk

more about RSS, sometimes called Really Simple Syndication, next month).

Like local search, these specialty search areas are still being developed and

refined. So rather than give you likely-to-be-obsolete steps for getting yourself opti-

mized and listed, we’re going to give you our methodology for finding out how.

Here are the steps:

Search as if your site depends on it.

First, go to the specialty search engine and start

searching. You want to get the full picture of what the listings look like. Try searching

for your own organization, your competitors, product names, and commercial and

noncommercial sites. Get a feel for listings that seem compelling and listings that look

skippable, and try to put your finger on why they’re coming across that way. Also,

keep an eye out for sites that are partnered with the search engine. For example, when

you search our favorite term—“Britney Spears”—on

http://videos.yahoo.com

, you’ll

see a featured listing from Y! Music in a coveted top-of-the-screen position. You may

want to pursue a listing in a partner site, if it’s at all possible.

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