It’s definitely not perfected yet, but Google has made some changes to their search engine that could potentially affect SEO. This doesn’t mean SEO has to be affected in a negative way, but optimizers should be thinking about some new ways to get ranked in Google’s new categories in their results.
Now, when people search for anything in Google, there is a link at the top that says, “Show Options.” This link brings up categories that will organize the search search results. The categories include reviews, videos, forums, recent results and a few other super-fun categories. While the “recent results” categories seem to be an attempt to compete with Twitter, the categories SEO marketers should be focusing on are the reviews, forums, images and videos.
These are new ways to get ranked well on Google. Marketers need to figure out the best ways to get ranked for these categories, which might end up being easier than getting ranked in the main section of the search results. Make sure you post some reviews about the company you’re working for, and also post on some forums. If you haven’t made any videos yet, it’s time to sign up for YouTube and get on the ball. It’s only a matter of time before other people start doing this, and so make sure to get ranked before the competition does.
These changes go along with the recent changes made to promote and increase visibility to Google profiles. These profiles are another chance for people to get ranked in Google, but instead of for a review or video, it’s for their name.
Google seems to be trying to make their searches more relevant (imagine that!), and while this may work for some searches, like people’s names or certain videos, it probably isn’t going to be a “Twitter Killer” or change and SEO community and any major way. If you’re search engine optimizer, you can probably relax a little bit. You’re job will change, but the job of someone in the SEO field is changing all the time. This shouldn’t be new to you, and it’s a change that can be dealt with.
June 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
[...] is that the rules what you you should do to increase your rankings can change from day to day. Search engines are changing their algorithms all the time, which means if you aren’t staying on top of the updates, your [...]