Press Release Bar

So in keeping with that tradition, I’d like to post a few of my own. But unlike those who post their predictions in point form, I won’t make a specific líst but rather share with you some of my thoughts.

(Near the end, however, this post will culminate in what I believe will be three major trends to watch out for and dive into, if you want to make some serious money in 2008 and beyond.)

First off, let me state that you may or may not agree with me on these. But something is definitely going on right now that points to these three trends. All the clues are pretty evident, and you’ve probably seen some of these yourself.

What I’m talking about is…

… Internet marketing is correcting itself.

When the stock market tumbles, short of a full-on crash, they call it a “correction.” Sometimes it happens precipitously. Other times, it takes place over a period of time.

Likewise, I believe that Internet marketing, right now, is going through a similar correction. It may not be as precipitous as the stock market, but it’s indeed quite significant.

To explain what I mean, let me back up a bit.

If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing The Chasm“, then you understand the product adoption curve. (In marketing and academic circles, they call it the “Diffusion Process.”)

In plain English, it means that new markets go through a certain adoption process that looks very much like a bell curve.

At first, new products are consumed by the innovators and early adopters (i.e., niche and early markets). They’re the type of people who buy new things the moment they come out.

Then, they are consumed by the majority (i.e., mainstream markets, at the top of the bell curve, where products get widely adopted by the majority of people).

Finally, the laggards make up the late markets. They usually wait until everyone else has tried the products, which are no longer new.

According to Moore, between the niches and the mainstream, there’s a gap. A chasm, as he calls it, especially with technology. It’s where things seem to slow down once a product has saturated the early markets. But then, after a while, something happens.

The product, if and when it crosses the chasm, enters the mainstream (often called the “middle” or just the “majority”), and becomes widespread.

This is where the bulk of the market lies (about 68% of the market pie, according to studies). And often, it happens fast. Very fast. (For example, Moore’s follow-up book, “Inside the Tornado,” explains this in detail.)

What does this mean in terms of Internet marketing?

It means that the geeks (e.g., the risk-takers, innovators, Internet enthusiasts, and the like) are the first ones to penetrate the Internet market. They set many precedents that shape the way we do business, whether it’s through a new method, software, business model, or teaching.

(That’s why we often call them “gurus.”)

We’ve seen this happen. Top marketers have entered the market, sold many a product, and made massive amounts of money. But now, things are starting to change. We’re hitting – if not crossing – the chasm.

One obvious piece of evidence is the recent flurry of “death of” reports. Whether they’re meant to promote something or not is a moot point.

Clayton Makepeace listed his own predictions recently , and I not only agree with them wholeheartedly but also view them as part of this crossing of the chasm. To me, the most salient point is that only 18% of the world’s population is online – but it’s growing at a rapid rate, particularly in Asia.

If you don’t believe me (or even Clayton), watch this video:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

It’s a presentation by a statistical researcher about income distribution around the globe, and how quickly some countries are growing in terms of wealth and gross national product, once the Internet enters them.

In short, the video shows that the Internet, while still in its infancy, is growing at a rapid rate, and that there is hyper-growth occurring right now in Asian and middle-Pacific countries, such as Singapore, India, and of course, China.

Let me put that aside for just a moment, and share with you a few observations. (I will tie all of this together very shortly, I promise.)

Here’s a question:

Haven’t you noticed lately how Internet marketing seminars are changing?

I mean, for many years seminars were not only filled to the rim but also filled with the usual suspects who seem to congregate there all the time.

I remember going to seminar after seminar, and seeing the same faces over and over again. The same million-dollar marketers. The same “big names.” The same expert speakers. And very few newbies or unknowns.

But in 2007, a shift started to happen. Some of those faces are not showing up at seminars anymore. The number of old-timers seems to be shrinking, while new faces are making their appearances for the first time.

With each passing seminar, it seems, the audience is slowly being replaced with new marketers and total newbies – people who are completely new to Internet marketing and even to the Internet in general.

More and more veteran marketers are retiring. Some are leaving the Internet marketing field altogether. Many are no longer attending seminars, speaking at them, or teaching Internet marketing at all.

Is it because the Internet marketing industry is dying or jumping the shark?

Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. While some Internet marketers have moved on, many of them have simply refocused their businesses on those three major markets I was referring to earlier.

To give you a hint, let me tell you a true story…

At the last seminar my wife and I attended, I was surprised to see that the vast majority of attendees was completely new. The event was still packed to the rim (and even bigger than before). But many of them admitted to us that this was the first seminar they’ve ever attended.

In fact, they were so new that, at a previous seminar where my wife and I spoke, we were both surprised by the kinds of questions they asked us.

After speaking on stage and walking towards the back of the room, Sylvie and I were asked questions like, “What is an autoresponder?” Or, “How do you create a text file?” (No joke!)

And it didn’t just happen once or twice. It happened many, many times. And it happened at almost every single seminar we’ve attended or spoke at in 2007.

Now, what does all this mean?

It means several things: Internet marketing is shifting. We are seeing more and more people entering it for the first time. We are seeing less of the successful, seasoned marketers who have made their wealth and moved on.

In other words, what we’re seeing is a shift to people who are completely green, entering the world of Internet marketing, and launching a business online for the very first time – with very limited knowledge about it to boot.

And many of the existing, top marketers we have learned from in the last few years have either retired or decided to go after… well… the “majority!” That is, they are going offline.

Yes, offline.

And that, my friends, is the golden key.

More importantly, we’re seeing – and we’ll see more of – the Asian market, too, entering the Internet marketing sphere.

The more Asian citizens gain access to the web, the more Internet marketing will change, too, to reflect this shift. China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and others are definitely going to be forces to be reckoned with.

We’re seeing this already.

(Sylvie and I are speaking in Singapore next spring, by the way. Some of these events pack as many as 3,000 people.)

Bottom line, these shifts represent not only a major correction affecting the world of Internet marketing, but also show the three major markets to watch out for in the coming year:

The newbie market; The offline market; The Asian market. And that’s my prediction for the new year and beyond. Watch out for these markets. Enter them. Serve them. Or get out of the way.

That said, I do have a few technology-related predictions. (A blog post on new year’s predictions wouldn’t be complete without them, eh?)

Some of the ones I made last year did come true – and we’ll see more and more of them in 2008 as well.

For example, online video will become ubiquitous. The web will become increasingly “widgetized.” People will demand for more simplification. And interactivity will become vastly more popular and sophisticated.

But what about some of the major technology companies?

Well, I hate to make those kinds of predictions because Internet marketing is as volatile as the stock market. But I agree that some major acquisitions are in store for the coming year. My guess? Any one of the following…

AOL by Yahoo!;

Yahoo! by Microsoft; Technorati or SixApart (makers of MovableType and TypePad) by Microsoft or Yahoo! (likely to compete in the blogging space against none other than giants WordPress and Google’s Blogger); Or Facebook – maybe by Microsoft, Yahoo!, or someone else. Speaking of Facebook, whether or not it does get acquired, it’s going to see the same kind of decline in popularity in 2008 that MySpace saw in 2007.

In fact, when my kids got me onto Facebook earlier this year, and I refused at first because I told them I already had a MySpace account, in a pretentious tone they replied, “But Dad, MySpace is soooo last year!”

I think Facebook will face the same fate, I fear. Anyway, there you have it.

Until next time, thank you for your support this year. I appreciate you and wish you a peaceful, healthy, profitable, happy, and prosperous new year!
About The Author
Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, marketing strategy consultant, and instrumental in some of the most lucrative online businesses and wildly successful marketing campaigns to ever hit the web. For more articles like this one, please visit his blog at http://www.michelfortin.com and subscribe to his RSS feed.

Evidence 1) Photosynth
If you have any technology mavens as friends it is likely you saw this incredible video presented by Microsoft at the TED conference last year discussing Photosynth. To quote Microsoft Lab’s Photosynth home page this software

“takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.”

My jaw still hurts from hitting the ground after my first viewing of Photosynth many months ago. This software made a massive impression on me that has led me to many interesting ideas on the applications for this software; I will leave these thoughts to another time. For now, however, lets just say that the advent of a technology such as Photosynth provided a first glimpse into how images on the web can play a far greater role than ever imagined.

Evidence 2) PicLens by cooliris
PicLens is a fantastic plugin that allows searchers to navigate a 3d gallery of images associated with the topic they are searching. The user can also surf related images by simply clicking on a small play icon that appears on images anywhere in their browser (the icon appears on the image when the user’s mouse hovers over it for a moment). So where does PicLens get its content from? PicLens has complete access to the image caches of: Google, Yahoo, Flickr, SmugMug, Photobucket and DeviantArt.

This free, incredibly useful software is available now and it represents a new way for the masses to think about search; instead of showing information in a ranking format, PicLens makes browsing images as simple as a flick of your mouse (momentum will actually allow the images to move by). Right now PicLens is naturally designed for images but who says it needs to stay that way?

Evidence 3) SearchMe
When my colleague showed me the preview of SearchMe I knew I had the linchpin for this very article. SearchMe is a new search engine in private Beta at the moment but this next generation search engine has finally married image search in a manner that will get many tongues wagging.

As this video outlines in detail SearchMe allows searchers to type in a search and then define the intended topic of their search in order to provide the most relevant results. Once the user selects their topic they are provided with a slick but simple page showing pictures of each resulting web page that can be scanned through in a manner similar to PicLens.

Now these are not images in a classic sense, since they are actually just screenshots of the existing web pages, however, the technology is extremely similar and it seems natural that the final version of SearchMe’s image search option would utilize the same technology.

Tying it all Together
What is the one thing that all of these concepts have in common? The answer is marvelously simple; they all focus on the simple concept that a picture is worth a thousand words. Why show a snippet of content in a search engine result page when a complete image could say so much more about the destination?

Are You Excited Yet?
So are we on the same page now? Are you as fascinated as I am with the next generation of search? If not, you had better get on board quickly; there is no doubt in my mind that image-based searching is the natural evolution of search. Don’t get me wrong, on page content will still play a large role in algorithms but the days of top 10 results are numbered.

What Will this Mean to SEO?
Basically a few existing elements of search engine optimization will become more important:

1. Web pages will have to be designed with a tighter focus on usability and simplicity for screenshots to appear interesting/relevant enough to click on.
2. Images will always need to be appropriately tagged and described.
3. Web site images will have to be picked with more care from stock photography sites in order to capture the eyes of image-surfing prospects.
4. SEOs will find it useful to include sales-oriented information in images but not at the expense of the image.
5. Content around images and the overall page text must be extremely relevant to the image and the description and tags that are attributed to it.

In short, the evolution of search will continue to do what it has always done; make us all work harder to provide better quality content. One thing is for certain… the evolution of search just makes search engine optimization services interesting and necessary in order to maintain search success in multiple search environments.

About The Author
Ross Dunn is the CEO and Founder of StepForth Web Marketing Inc.; based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Ross’s articles and those of the StepForth team at news.stepforth.com or contact us at StepForth.com, Tel:             250-385-1190 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 250-385-1190 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , TollFree:             877-385-5526 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 877-385-5526 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , Fax: 250-385-1198 .

A scientist at heart, Craig is probably best known as the developer of Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search) and the founder of Google’s software engineering center in New York City.

This article is a summary of his presentation at Webstock 2008.

Google’s Spelling Bee

Craig started his presentation by talking about one of his first challenges in his job at Google: the spelling correction tool. As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able to spell-correct lots of obscure words. So his solution was to take a sampling of content from the entire web. Craig’s team came up with a algorithmic model and ran it over the web. He discovered that there were several correct answers to the same question. For example, words like “kofee” could mean either the searcher is seeking a cup of java or information about Kofee/Kofi Anan.

To combat this, Craig came up with an interesting solution: the “Did you mean?” alternative spelling option, based on predictive examples of searcher spelling patterns. You can see this in action if you type in “kofee anan” in Google. Above the search results is a line that reads: “Did you mean: kofi annan” and links to the search results for this spelling variation too.

But the research went even further. Craig’s team worked out how to take into account the context of the search query by studying the two or three other keywords surrounding the query, for example “kofee cup” or “kofee anan”. The research used the science of bigrams and trigrams to better understand how people search. Bigrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text. So Craig and his team applied this knowledge to Google’s spelling correction system and now, Google’s algorithm can determine the searcher’s intent with much more accuracy, based on the context of the search query.

As an example of the spelling challenges that Google faces, Craig showed the audience the huge number of ways “Britney Spears” is misspelled on the web. He said it’s encouraging to see that the most popular spelling is also the most correct one. Scale is important!

Google Maps Lead to Apps

The Google team wrote the code for Google Maps many years ago but the code was actually built into your browser. When Google maps first launched, people took the dense data-script and worked out how to reverse engineer it for their own use. Google engineers decided to release an API key to make these mash-ups easier after seeing so many people reverse engineer Google Maps without Google’s help. Now people can mash-up Google maps within minutes to create their own applications.

To show how easy this is to do, Craig took the audience through the steps to create an interactive application with Google Maps. In the space of about two minutes, he signed up for an API key, grabbed the HTML code and pasted it into his page. He then hacked the map to show Wellington Town Hall (our location) and made the point how easy it is to create really useful tools out of technology that is already available.

As an example, Craig showed the audience Seattle Bus Monster. This site uses an API key for Google Maps to make Seattle bus data and tracking available 24/7. Anyone who needs to catch a bus can look online and instantly find their nearest bus location and run to the bus stop in time to catch it. It’s these types of interactive applications that add value to both corporate and government sites.

Craig referenced Rodney Brooks from MIT whose provocative paper “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” offered new logic and a completely different view of machines. The idea is that there is no center of control among robots so you should make lots of them; don’t treat them so precious. Craig said developers should use this logic to create lots of small apps that you can replicate and tweak, rather than one big expensive app that can go horribly wrong. Scale trumps smarts every time!

Experiments in Scale That Have Impacted Google’s Operations

Precision vs. Recall

Back in the early 90′s, information retrieval on the web was limited to things like Lexus/Nexus. So at that stage, Google would take queries and apply it to the broadest possible search. This was great recall at the cost of precision. But Larry and Sergey wanted something better so they decided to use Boolean search. At the time it was heresy because everything was focused on recall. But the Google founders knew that things had to be super relevant so they developed an algorithm – the core algorithm. It was very simple and relied on Boolean search to determine relevancy.

Genomic Sequencing

In the mid 90′s a large project – the Human Genome Project – was underway. The race was on to sequence the genome. Scientists decided to feed this out to a bunch of different people. They chopped up the genome for researchers everywhere and allowed it to replicate. The researchers mapped each chunk with genetic markers and computed a tiling path of tiny fragments.

Sequencing was very expensive, so the data was computed based on a minute number of chunks – very labor intensive. The sequencing took forever and reassembling was a long way off. But then a company came along that said they could do it faster. Sequencing becomes cheaper by automating the job using machines rather than individual people so this company used a clever computer algorithm to conduct the sequencing. This reduced the cost and the researchers were therefore able to reassemble more fragments and achieve a rough draft of the genome in 2000. This sequencing approach was the shotgun approach, where accuracy is lower, but the larger scale allowed the impossible to become possible.

Web Definitions

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for “definition of…”, or “what is a….” etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Now Google allows you to use the “definition:” query and the question format to get definitions from around the web. Type in “what is a blog?” and you’ll get lots of results from Craig’s original script.

Protein Sequencing

In biology, Craig says, you’re constantly producing proteins. The proteins fold up with particular sequencing. Within computing, you can use this knowledge to do amazing things. You can conduct computations with this type of data but it’s time consuming. Somebody at Stanford University noticed that proteins spend a lot of time moving about before folding into an alpha helix. So it was suggested they start the computations with lots of configurations. In this way you can parallelize the data by scale and one will be magically close to a folded protein. So they worked out a way to reduce the problem to a simple process based on mass scale. This is why Google uses maximum scale to conduct algorithmic computations.

Chess vs. Go

You can now compute the value of any potential move in chess. Based on that information, you can compute your projected probability of winning the game from any move. Chess grand masters put a lot of time into this knowledge. But the opposite is true for the game Go, because there is more randomness to the game play.

(Stay tuned for Part 2)

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

There’s a lot to cover and I hate long articles that drone on so I’ll keep the info short and sweet. Let’s start with the domain name.

Domain Names

Age:Make sure your domain name is at least six months old. If it’s more than a year old, that’s even better. Google often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They use a “whois” database like the one at:

http://www.AllWhoIs.com

Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what Google (and anyone else in the world) can instantly know about your site.

TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are “.com, .net. .org and .edu.” These get the most play in Google’s top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can imagine, with “.com” and “.edu” being the best.

Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword (and ONLY your main keyword) as a dotcom domain name with even just halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword. I’ve done it dozens of times. It’s a no brainer.

Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for branding, but it can open whole new doors of opportuníty for your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google treats a dash as a null value (almost like a space) and can take them or leave them with equal indifference. So, if your main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a dash between each word. If that’s taken, just try one dash separating the first and second words but leave the second and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just keep trying combinations until you have one that works and scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months, you’ll have it when you want it.

Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword embedded domain name in the world will mean little if nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let’s find the best keywords possible for your site. Here’s how…

Keywords:

Keywords in Demand: Let’s snoop into Google’s keyword database and find some winners. Go to Google Keyword Tool and enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by desired search volume to see which words get the most searches.

Go Long: And don’t be afraid to use longer keywords as long as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash laden) domain names and even help cut back on your competition.

Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant keywords and phrases and líst them in order of “Approximate Monthly Searches Performed.” You might want to paste the keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit of math so we might as well let Excel do it.

Competition:

Competition: Less is Better: “Less is better.” Well that’s the understatement of the year. But how do you know how much competition you will be up against? It’s easy. Simple division does the trick nicely. Here’s how…

Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see how many pages you will be competing against if you try to optimize for that keyword (Results 1 – 10 of about 123,000,000 for “keyword”.) Now record that number in the cell to the right of “searches performed.” You can go ahead and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the info you need have Excel divide the number of “competing pages” by the number of “searches performed.” The lower the resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of “searches performed.” This is your optimal target.

Even More: But we’re not done yet! Now find the next best two runnerup keywords and write them down in order of importance. We’ll need them soon.

Content:

The King Lives!: You’re probably sick of hearing it but content really is king. Developing search engine friendly, well optimized content (for REAL people) is key to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here’s what DOES work…

Keep it Real: Call a close fríend and tell him or her exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as quick as you can write it down, as close to “word for word” as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.

Fitting In: Now, with your líst of three keywords, go back through your text and fit your most important keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your third keyword should go into the beginning of the second paragraph if possible.

Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.

Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword (number 3 pick) at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at the end. This shows consistency (at least as far as Google is concerned.)

Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over the course of about 9 paragraphs.)

Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:

Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor your progress and your site’s status (how search engines REALLY see it). This will tell you not just where you are – but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week; per site!). My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

I started out with WebPosition Pro and used it for a couple years but switched to another tool that has automated linking, which I find to be the most time-consuming and now most important aspect of SEO on Google. This was probably a good call since Web Position was recently banned by Google for abuse.

Anyway, here are my results for both…

SE0elite Cost = $167 (lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees)

Personal Results: 121 top 5 rankings on Google in 3 weeks – Mostly 1′s and 2′s.
Best Features: Finds best link partners; Automates link process; Finds “Google “authority sites.”

WebPosition Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (plus $99 per year subscription fees for either)

Personal Results: 44 top 5 rankings in Google in eight weeks – Mostly 3′s and 4′s.
Best Features: Site Monitoring (recently banned by Google); Great reporting; Site Critic

Now you’re ready to dominate Google. Good luck!
About The Author
Michael Small is the founder of the free SEO (search engine optimization) blog SEOpartner.com and author of a dozen search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook, available at theSeoNotebook.com .

Universal Search combines all the information within its Vertical engines/databases into one index to serve a single set of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

An example of Vertical engines/databases are Google News, Google Video, Google Images etc.

What this means is when you go to www.google.com, (their most highly trafficked domain) and do a search, rather than just getting websites from their main index, you will also get results from the News, Images, Video, etc databases as well. It is a more comprehensive results page.

Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer said the company’s goal for universal search is to create “a seamless, integrated experience to get users the best answers.”

Sometimes the information you are looking for is best delivered by video, or images or a news story. Currently, you would have to search each of the Vertical engines/databases to get all the information. Google is planning to integrate it into one search engine.

As a searcher this means easier access to various forms of information with only one search. It seems like a good thing, as long as the results are easily organized on the page. It could mean more scrolling to get to the different areas of results, depending how they lay it out.

What To Do and Why

Changes with the search engines can sometimes be confusing. There is a lot of information to evaluate and some decisions to be made. Before you decide anything, you need to understand what your options are.

If your site isn’t already properly optimized for organic rankings, that would be the place to start. You want to make sure you have clean, search engine friendly code and a solid foundation, as well as on-page optimization. This would be the starting point, without this in place you have no hope of competing in the engines – with or without Universal Search.

If your site is already properly and aggressively optimized, then you are in good shape to build on that and benefit from Universal Search.

Since Universal Search will take information from the Verticals (like images, press releases, videos, audios, Blog postings, etc) you want to make sure that you have some exposure in each of those areas.

Imagine someone does a search for what you have to offer, and in the Universal Search results your webpage comes up. In the same search your competitor’s site comes up PLUS your competitor has video, images and Blog posts as well. A searcher is more likely to click on your competitor’s site since more of the total number of results that come up will belong to your competitor.

The other factor is the layout of the results page. We don’t know yet how it will play out. If Google mixes all the results together (ex: videos, web pages, Blog posts, images, etc all come up intermingled) that creates one scenario. It means you aren’t competing apples to apples for the top spot. It could be video in the 1st position and you are hoping to get your web pages ranked in the 1st position.

Another way of delivering the results would be to group them by category. They could líst all the Blog results, then all the video results under that, and then all the image results under that, etc.

If that is the case, you want to have something listed in each category section because if you happen to have a ranking in the last category section but nothing higher on the page, you are not likely to get a click.

What you really need to do in addition to adding content and optimizing your site, is also focus on getting something in the other Verticals.

Top 5 Ways To Participate in Universal Search

1. Google Image Search: It has always been a good idea to use images on your site for illustrating your products and services. Now customers can find your site via Google Image Search. Optimize your images with descriptive, keyword-rich file names and ALT tags. Use accurate descriptions of your image files for the benefit of those who might need to view the site in text only format.

2. Google Video (beta): Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for your video files. Also create a keyword-rich title tag, description tag, and video site map.

3. Google News: Submit your press releases for display as news, and also as a new content page on your site.

4. Google Maps: AKA Google Local – this has been included in Google search results for a while. Give your site a local presence through the Google Maps Local Business Center where local businesses can get a free basic listing to extend their reach in the SERPs.

5. Google Blog Search (beta): Use social media and Blog engines to drive traffic to the site. Submit to the Google Blog search and have your Blog help boost you in the new world of Universal Search.

With a better understanding of the options, it becomes clear that in order to boost your exposure in the search engines and get new traffic you need to be proactive in anticipation of these Universal Search changes. Don’t wait until it is too late and you are scrambling to catch up.

About The Author
Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of EcomBuffet.com . Since 1998, her expertise in online marketíng and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients improve revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer@ecombuffet.com.