What other options are there for OneBox?
Not everyone sells products online. I don’t understand why they don’t, but some people just create content. I’m joking of course, but I thought it was worth mentioning that there are other options for appearing in the onebox. In fact, there are quite a few ways that non-product items can show up in OneBox results. There are enough that I doubt if I’ll get them all covered. I’m also looking for some guests to share some insight on optimizing the other results.
A few of the more common ones are going to be mentioned this time, and I’ll see what I can do about getting some optimization techniques for these from some experts down the road.
Google News is an option for those doing press releases or running news sites. Optimizing a press release for Google News is a great way to get traffic to a new site if you submit it to the right places. Getting a site listed as a news source takes some time and the right site content, but certainly press releases are something most anyone can do, and they’re not too terribly tough to optimize around a specific phrase.
Google Image Search is an option for most any site with many pictures. Celebrities drive a ton of traffic of course, but even some of our power tools show up there depending on the search phrase. Creating some decent wallpaper is one strategy you could use to get reasonable results, but just about any image on your site could show up if you do the right things.
Google Local is an incredible way to drive traffic to stores and service providers. This also shows up in OneBox results at times. This is simply a matter of getting listed. From what I can tell so far, there’s not a lot of optimization one can do, but it’s getting to be more widely used and is something to keep an eye on.
I’m sure I’m missing plenty here, but this post is just to remind you that there are other options for showing up in OneBox results on Google. This isn’t just all about products, so I’ll try to get some people lined up to either interview about other optimization strategies or perhaps some guess bloggers. You’ll just have to wait and find out.