Google Universal Search means that news, blog, video, image and local search results become more important. What is a webmaster to do?

As Pandia reported last week, Google is slowly introducing what it calls Google Universal Search.

The company will introduce listings from the vertical search engines into regular Google web search results. By vertical search engines we mean search services like Google News, Google Video, Image Search, Blog Search etc.

Google is taking a risk

This is not an easy feat. The different vertical search engines are stored in different databases with different scoring systems,
and to determine which “vertical” search result is relevant and worthy for inclusion in regular web search results takes processing power — as does calculating its ranking relative to regular web search results.

So Google is taking a huge risk by trying this out. If people perceive that search results are getting less relevant, this may undermine their trust in Google. This is probably why Google is taking a step by step approach.

It is getting harder to rank well

So what does this mean for webmasters and search engine marketers trying to rank well in Google web search results? After all, the regular Google web search results is the main traffic generator on the web.

There is no doubt about it: It will get harder to get good results.

As any search-engine-marketing-schoolboy should know, the first page of results is what really matters. You may generate relevant traffic with good ROI from page 2 and 3, but listings below position 10 will not generate much as regards quantity.

The best positions are No. 1, 2, 3 and (as one search engine engineer told us) No. 7 or 8. (People apparently click on listing No. 7 or 8 instead of going to the next page).

For newcomers and small sites it is extremely hard to get into the top 10 for competitive keyword phrases, as they have to compete with optimized corporate sites and old sites with much authority.

Now they will also have to compete with fresh listings generated from blogs, news headlines and videos!

Not all search engine result pages will include such vertical results, but in a “worst case scenario” four or five results of this kind will be taken by such listings. That leaves five to six positions for the rest of us.

So what is a webmaster to do?

As always: turn it all into an advantage.

Make sure you have content that fits into the vertical databases and that can be included in regular search results. And that means producing more relevant content — more work!

Blog results

Google Blog Search is not the pride and joy of Google. It is too spammy, and we expect Google to hold back on introducing many blog search results in regular web search results until this algorithm improves.

It makes sense to include blog search results, though, as they include very fresh content, often less than a couple of hours old.

To get into blog search results you will have to set up a weblog.

If you have a corporate site, you may make the blog part of that site. Any links pointing to blog posts will enhance the overall popularity of that site, and may improve rankings site wide.

(However, if you have a site dominated by catalog content that is similar to what your competitors are presenting, you are better off by putting the blog up on a different domain. If your site is dominated by duplicate content, all the pages on that domain may suffer and never rank well.)

One problem facing Google when ranking blog posts is that their normal PageRank procedure does not work as well as in regular search results. You cannot use the number of inbound links to a blog post as the main factor in calculating importance and relevance if the page is only a few hours old.

This leads us to believe that important factors in a blog search algorithm must be the overall authority of the site (hence: publish your blog on you most popular domain) and the popularity of the blog over time.

This means that you have to do some serious work on your blog. It will have to be so good, that it generates many inbound links over time.

For tips on how to promote your blog, see our report How to make use of social media in search engine marketing.

What is a blog to Google?

How does Google identify a blog? How does it know that it is a blog and not a regular news column or any other web page?

There are clearly patterns in the coding of blogs that can be used to identify them. It shouldn’t be that hard to guess that the post you are reading now is published using one of the most popular blog software packages available, namely Wordpress.

However, we guess that Google is also using the most popular blog search engines/catalogs to identify blogs. On Friday I published the first post of my personal blog Aviana PK.

It took Google less than eight hours to find the blog and include posts in blog search results. Admittedly, Aviana is a very old domain, but we believe the reason Google found it so quickly was that we submitted it to Technorati.

Google News

It is much harder to get into Google News. You must publish news articles on a regular basis, which is not the same as personal blog posts.

However, Google does not mind news columns focusing on a narrow theme, as long as the articles contain fresh content.

To get listed, use the form on the Google Help for Publishers page.

Note that Google News will spider your web pages, it will not make use of your RSS feed (although you may help if finding your articles using a News sitemap).

Furthermore, the file name must contain a unique three digit number. If your current permalink structure (URL) does not have a three digit number, you will have to change the URLs.

Needless to say, that can be a painful experience, given that you should try to avoid changing the current URLs out of respect for existing inbound links and search engine listings. So, if you are planning new sites and there is a remote possibility that this site may one day include news, do add three digits to the URL.

(And, yes, this is why the URL of this page has a three digit number!)

Note that Google may accept blog posts into Google News results. Pandia Search Engine News is one of the sites included in Google News.

This means that in addition to our posts being included in Google Blog Search, Google will also include some (but not all) of our news articles in Google News.

(The fact that our Google News headlines are edited, leads us to suspect that there are human beings involved).

Finally, within a day or two in our case, the article will also become part of the regular Google web search database.

Google Video

If relevant, Google may also include videos in search results, and Google already embeds videos in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Videos will be very relevant in the case of news stories and coverage of movies, movie stars and music artists. However, there is nothing to stop you from making a simple video tutorial on the topic of your choice.

At Pandia we use Macs and Susanne made a slide show of holiday pictures in less than five minutes using iPhoto. You can present a Powerpoint presentation as a video, add a soundtrack and some comments, and if you are very good at it you may have a link-worthy video.

Video files are big. If your server cannot handle them, you may use YouTube to distribute the video.

A link to YouTube will not help the Pagerank of your pages, but if you include the necessary information in the video and on YouTube, the video itself may generate links and traffic to your site.

In any case, make sure that you include the relevant meta data in the video file, as most video search engines make use of metadata and the surrounding text when determining what the video is about. They will not normally try to decipher the spoken words in the soundtrack.

Video search engine blinkx has a white paper that explains the basics.

For more useful tips on how to make video content that ranks well, see our report from the Search Engine Strategies NY conference on How to succeed with online video content.

Images

If you have a site with many good quality images, you may use pictures to attract visitors to your site.

As in the case of videos, regular text is important. Make sure you put a good description of the image into the HTML alt-tag, and — if possible — into the surrounding text.

You may also choose to opt in to Google’s Enhanced Image Search (sign up to the Google Webmaster Central first).

If you do this, Google will present your images to people taking part in the Google Image Labeler program and ask them to label your pictures.

Local search

Google may also include local search results in their new Universal Search results. One way of getting included here is to sign up for a local business listing.

Getting others to produce content

Normally a search engine marketer should focus on his or her own site when developing their search engine marketing strategy. Getting inbound links to that domain is very important.

Given the increasing importance of news, blogs and images, however, it might be necessary to think outside that box. Any search engine result that points to content that mention your site is valuable, even if the page, image or video do not belong to your site.

First of all, such content may lead visitors to your site. Second such content may contain links to your site.

Moreover, Google is unlikely to include too many links from one site in web search results, and having a relevant result from another site may therefore come in handy.

This leads us to believe that producing content for other sites will become more important, as long as that content is connected to your site.

To give you one idea: Let’s say you own a large multinational corporation with a lot of Internet savvy employees. Company policy is probably not to encourage them to post in their personal blogs during working hours.

But if you can identify the best and most popular bloggers, you might consider giving them an hour or two every week to blog. Then give them some good material relevant to your company: Some good party photos, maybe? A scoop on your latest product? Our guess is that they will include such posts, without you forcing them to do so.

As long as these blogs are content rich, and you can stop employees from manipulating the scheme, this cannot be considered spam. It is, simply, a product placement. It cannot be a coincidence that so many Google employees are blogging!

In the media industry you might consider identifying relevant bloggers and send them relevant content from time to time.

It makes no sense to us when record companies try to close down fan sites due to copyright infringement. Make a deal with them and give them the relevant photos and images. Their blog articles will be included in blog search results.

See also: Taking advantage of universal search (Google Webmaster Central Blog)