Google’s Universal Search…Is it Going to Affect our SEO Efforts?

By now you have all heard about Google launching its Universal Search this past May. Since then I have been watching and testing it myself to see exactly how it was going to effect our rankings. My finding are nothing but good for us SEO’s, that have been building search engine friendly Web sites and taking advantage of vertical search services and vertical search engines.

Let’s first explain how the new Universal Search works.

Google has started to mix listings from their news, video, images, local and book search engines (their vertical search services) among its regular searches that are crawled from the actual Web.

They predicted that Universal Search would have a big impact on those marketers that did not take into account the importance of vertical searches, but those marketers that saw to it that their sites were listed in various vertical searches should not see a big difference. What they will see is more exposure for their marketing message.

Before I go any further let me do a quick recap on vertical searches. Vertical searches are those engines or services that are industry or topic specific, where you can find information about your topic without having to search through millions of responses on the regular horizontal search engines.

Say for instance you were looking for a specific news related story. You could do a regular search on a horizontal search engine like, Google, MSN/Live or Yahoo! or you could do a vertical search on Google’s News Service. The likelihood that you would find better results on a vertical news service is greater then sifting through the regular results from a horizontal search engine.

Or say you only want to find a photo of George Washington, you could search for it on the regular Google search or narrow your search down and use Google’s Image vertical search service and find your results much quicker.

If you hadn’t noticed Google has its own vertical search services and you can find them above the search box on their home page. They have tried for years to get people to narrow their search down further by using vertical searches but they just could not get enough users to notice them. Many Internet searches have all been fixated on the regular search box that they really did not know what the vertical search services were all about or even to use them.

So hence…this is the reason for Google’s Universal Search. Google is hitting several of its vertical search services all at once and bringing back those results to mix in with the regular search results. They wanted this change so the vertical search results could become a normal experience instead of relying on people to notice the specialized tabs for their vertical search services.

What does this mean for your rankings? It means that your position may or may not drop depending on how many vertical search results are mixed in with the regular results for any one search.

So what can you do?

To start with you still need to look for qualified links and directories to link to that are industry related. Google will still look at those partnerships to determine relevancy so you still need to be sure your links are from trusted sites that match your content.

Next, I would suggest you review Google’s Vertical Search Services. Do any of their categories match your content and make sense for your site if you submitted to their images, news, or video databases.

Here are some tips to get your sites ready for Universal Search:

1. First, your SEO efforts should still remain the same. Build high quality, search engine optimized web pages following all the basic SEO principles you already know.

2. Concentrate on working on strategies that include creating multimedia content such as blogs, videos and podcasts, and then get them listed on social media marketing sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Be certain they are tagged and cataloged properly.

3. Use Google Image Search – Make sure the images on your site all have relevant alt tags that clearly describe the image and don’t use your alt tags for keyword stuffing. Use them as they where intended to be used.

4. Video Files – Create a page on your web site to launch your video, optimize it for the content it contains and submit it to Google Video.

5. Are you using the power of “Press Releases?” – Submit your press releases as news and release information on new products, services or events and Google News will likely pick it up.

6. Every local business should be using Google Maps. Give your site a local presence through Google Maps Local Business Center. This is great for Google’s Personalized Search!

7. Submit your Blog to Google Blog Search

So what does this all really mean to us?

It means that over time the organic web page search results may diminish and vertical search results may prevail. As SEO’s we need to realize that our web pages, by themselves may not be the premier search results as we once knew them so we need to really start considering every other form of digital content available to us.

Google, as well as all of the other major search engines, that may follow suit only want to give their users the most qualified search results as possible. They will continue to tweak and perfect Web searches until the results we get are exactly what we are looking for using all different forms of marketing from, web pages, news, blogs, images, maps and video.

Start preparing your site for the future now jump on board Google’s Universal Search!
 

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