We are all sort of accustomed to seek out rankings for organic search only but there are actually many different areas of search other than just organic that is equally important for online business to be visible in.

Below are a few of the more important ones all websites should keep an eye on:

• Image Search – Many search online everyday through image searches to find what they need. If you have a website or blog that uses a great deal of images it is important to optimize those images so that can rank in image search as well. Make the URL of the image friendly along with your image alt tag. Over time you will notice in your analytics information how many people will make it to your website just from using the image search feature.

• Video Search – This is an area that has seen explosive growth over the last few years and will most likely continue to see even more as time goes on. Take the time and make an effort to put out some sort of company video for your business. Prospects will enjoy seeing the video appear in search results. There are ways to get this done on a budget.

• Social Search – You know social search? The thing that everyone is buzzing about now? Well search engines are starting to really index online conversations so it is time to take your online conversation to the next step. Get your audience bumping into your conversations online.

• Real Time Search – Real time search is happening right now! The search engines are getting super fast so they index material very quickly. Are you adding useful material everyday for the search engines to gobble up?

These are just some of the more important areas of search to be visible in. The search engines are starting to evolve and offer much more to the end user so it is important for your brand and your business to be visible in all the different areas of search not just the organic. A few years from now we will most likely see this list grow even more so take advantage of it while it is just beginning otherwise you could find yourself spending a great deal of time and resource to make up for lost time down the road.

If you are a marketer in this crazy digital era we live in you know firsthand how important it really is to be visible everywhere. You have Twitter, Facebook and that ancient form of marketing, email. All are very important so how do you prioritize which are the most important to seek during the day?

• Emails: The good thing about emails is that they are all yours. Nobody can take them away from you and you can reach out to them however you like. A nice email list is something that can be leveraged also when trying to form any partnerships. Most importantly an email list is tangible and very valuable. It takes a lot of effort to build a list of people who actually wish to hear from you on a regular basis.

• Facebook Fans: It depends on your industry but Facebook fans are always going to have some sort of importance. Facebook is not going anywhere any time soon. Facebook is most likely only getting started. As time goes on more demographics will start to make their way into the pages of Facebook and it will be important for your brand to at least be there waiting for them. It will be a place for them to get together and communicate at the very least. It is a website that will be an important force to be part of for a very long time.

• Twitter Followers: It is difficult to make an opinion on the future of Twitter but for the present time all businesses should be applying it in someway. When you have followers someone is bound to see you yelling so for the time being there is a certain level of importance to have a presence along with followers on Twitter. Be vocal, say something every day and visitors will migrate to you over time.

Rick Harris from Visibility Magazine had this to say about the issue:
“So, if one business said they had 10,000 opt-in email addresses and another said they had 10,000 followers on Twitter, then to me, and I believe the majority of the internet marketing industry, the opt-in email addresses are a whole lot more valuable to you as a business and make your business more credible.”

Each type of contact has a unique level of importance. Just remember that down the road if Twitter or Facebook shut their doors they take their fans and followers with them to the grave. All those years of hard work down the drain, whereas your email contacts will be quietly sleeping in a spreadsheet somewhere nobody can touch.

Whenever you start to put together a marketing plan for your website you really need to take a step back and start by asking yourself if your website is ready for more traffic. What good is all that new SEO traffic if your audience doesn’t have a clue what to do when they make it to your website?

Conversion aspects and search engine optimization should always go hand in hand. If you are not sure about what elements should be where on your website ask a professional to take a look before you spend a great deal of time figuring out how to drive more eye balls to it. This step is vital to the growth of your business. Not only does it help the way your audience interacts on your website but it also helps in strengthening your search engine optimization efforts if the right conversion efforts are implemented correctly. If your goal is to have potential clients and customers call you than your phone number should be visible in more than one area of your website. It is always smart to include the phone number in the header, middle of the page and bottom footer so that if a user visits your website and they scroll through any of your pages they will always be reminded that you are reachable and you that they can call you whenever they are ready. You can never assume that your website traffic will search for anything on your website. People need to be given the choice of what kind of action they want to take on your website. Your business goals should always be laid out on a path for your traffic to follow. The same types of principals apply to whatever the goals of your website are. Whether it is newsletter subscribers or online website sales it is important to have your website optimized for not just search but also for your users. Make sure the path is clear that you are leading them down also. Make the focus of the path the focal point of that page. Too many other distractions could cause that web user to exit your website.

Having the right the conversion aspects in place can drastically increase the amount of activity on your website and also decrease your overall bounce rate. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze your website to make sure it is in its most optimal state you could be missing out on some very valuable opportunities.

If you are making website changes or launching a new website you want to make sure the technical redirects and webmaster related pages are being used correctly, things like when to use a 301 redirect or when to use a 302 redirect. It might sound like not a big deal but the reality is if you get it wrong and the search engines assume you are trying to do something different than what you really are you might find yourself getting slapped on the wrist by Google.

If you own and operate your own website and you rely on its performance for your livelihood than you will have to play the role of your webmaster on more than one occasion. Google recently had a webmaster quiz and it was pretty interesting to see some of the results. Read more the quiz on the official Google webmaster blog.

Here are a couple of questions and answers that appeared on the quiz that might be very helpful to some of you:

Q: You bought multiple domain names and want them to all show the same website. What should you do with them?
A: Use a 301 redirect.

Q: Your website is not in the index 5 days after you’ve put it online; what should you do?
A: Continue working on the site.

Q: You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
A: Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Q: Which of the following is NOT against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
A: Running tests on a site that result in some users seeing one version of a page and other users are seeing another version.

Q: Link schemes that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results EXCEPT:
A: Links to other sites that you think your users will find interesting or useful.

These are just a sample of some of the most important Google questions and answers from a recent quiz. It would be in everyone’s best interest to not fight these and abide by what Google deems appropriate otherwise you could find yourself trying to dig your way out of a search engine penalty.

The SEO industry is still in its infancy stage whether you want to admit it or not. The search engines are very young and sites like Google are just starting to get things right in the sense of really understanding how to catalog and display search data for users. Some websites come and go in short burst of energy and some stick around for the long haul. The same goes with various marketing efforts.

It is important to never avoid a marketing effort simply because you think it will not stick around for long. I still hear people say that Twitter is short winded and it will only be here for just a few years. Even if it is shouldn’t you be there trying to scoop up new business while you can? Everything in life is evolving including the business world. The internet has created a fast moving platform for people to express themselves and to communicate on. Regardless of an efforts life cycle you should always be using it to market yourself. In today’s marketplace there is no time or room for denial. Websites and marketing efforts move in large sweeping motions so it is important to take advantage of any new or existing marketing effort you can incorporate into your business plan.

5 Years ago MySpace was the big dog in the industry. Now the numbers have been steadily declining for about the last 24 months while websites like Facebook and Twitter have seen explosive growth leaping frogging the competition almost overnight. During the height of the MySpace era lots of businesses made a great deal of money and grew their business marketing themselves in that specific online community. Now the demographic has really shifted away as they continue to lose more users but that doesn’t mean that MySpace should have been avoided all together. If nobody used it years ago many of those businesses would not have made the revenues they did if they chose to avoid it all together. The point is many online communication vehicles are always changing so it is important to hop on now than to regret later you didn’t even show up for the party.

You wouldn’t believe how many people I speak with who want to dive in and start an aggressive link building campaign and I look at their website and it is still so far behind in the optimization category it is not even funny. You need to make sure your website is 100% efficient before you even try to start a link building marketing campaign.

Before you focus on building links to your website, focus on your website first, consider looking at:

1. Website Design – Is your design at least up to par? You don’t want to send people to a website that hasn’t been updated in 6 years. You wouldn’t walk into an interview wearing a suit from the 60’s would you? Same rules apply.

2. On Site Optimization – Is your website even optimized for search yet? If you are not sure what that means you need to look into this before you decide you want potential clients finding your website. Here are some key points to make sure you have in place with your on site optimization:
• Is all your meta information custom crafted to the content on that specific page?
• Do you have enough content? I understand that people like to build sites taking minimalist approach sometimes but search engines can read white space. They need actual text to feed on so if you don’t have any text you will not rank anywhere.

• Do you URL’s look clean and friendly? If you URL’s have a long string of characters that flow across the whole URL bar in your browser you need to clean those up first. They need to be targeted, clean and specific to the content on that page
• Remove anything that might be frowned upon by the search engines. If you have pages with hundreds of links sitting around you need to clean that up. Make sure all links are pointing to relevant websites as well if you must have external links.

3. Conversion Aspects – Very important to have in place. What good is website traffic when they don’t have a clue what to do when they make it to your website? Do you want leads? Phone calls? Don’t assume anyone is going to look for a contact us page. These elements need to be in place before you start sending traffic to your website otherwise people will just leave your website and we don’t want that.

Your website is the foundation to your marketing so make sure everything is in place before you get going on any external marketing efforts. Have a solid foundation in place and you will see great results.

Having a successful online search engine optimization campaign is a lot like trying to win an Olympic gold medal. Nobody wakes up one day and says that they want to join the Olympics and it happens by the end of the week. SEO works the same way in the sense that things take time to build and grow and patience and good hard work is what it takes to have a successful search engine optimization mindset and approach.

Below are some of the most important similarities between an Olympic gold athlete and a successful SEO campaign:
• Both require having a solid plan in place.
• Both require hard work and dedication.
• Both require patience.
• Both require outside the box thinking.
• Both require early mornings and late nights.
• Both require having a vision.
• Both require great sacrifice.
• Both require knowledge and education.
• Both require a competitive edge.
• Both require awareness.

Search engine marketing is not a fly by night marketing effort and neither is training for the Olympics. You have to have solid plan in place and the ability to put in hard work and dedication to get the job done right. If you want your website to be visible and highly trafficked you need to be able to apply some outside the box thinking to achieve your goals. Building an online brand doesn’t happen by the end of the week or even by the end of the month. The best approach is to put a plan in place that you continuously expand upon. Write it down! Visualizing your vision will allow things to move with much less friction. Constantly update your plan of attack. Research new areas you want to be visible and make it happen. Most importantly you must stick to it.

These are all similarities that are relevant across not just Olympic athletes and internet marketers but anyone trying to make a name for themselves in any industry. As an aspiring internet marketer we could all take a page out of an Olympic athlete’s playbook.