How Does Google Universal Search Affect Search Engine Optimization?

Let’s be clear. Google wants to be the best search engine on the planet. It has done alot over the years to tweak its algorithm. This has affected rankings for many sites, since they have tried to filter out the black hatters and obvious spammers with minimal content. However the search engine gurus always find a way around these hacks, although it takes more resources and time.

Google is attempting to get more pinpoint accuracy with its search and it has left out a few pieces. Video has never really ranked highly even though people view billions of videos each year. Google has started trying to rank these sites, flash enabled sites, and more. They are also trying to weight the authority sites such as blog sites with enough weight but not too much so as to unbalance the scales of ranking. Many bloggers have used the natural authority weight that google gives to Squidoo or Hubpages to great effect. Creating multitudes of these blogs with high natural weight allows these bloggers to give power rank to nearly any website they want.

So this brings me to my point. Universal search is attempting to optimize billions of unranked sites, pages and videos that don’t exist in the engines today. This is creating an avalanche of new competitors. So, for many business owners not willing or able to create hundreds of targeted blog sites, Google Pay Per Click will be the only way to really compete. Obviously this means more income to Google. It also means outrageously high advertising for google key terms. This is forcing people to look at long-tail keyword phrases. That is the hot market going forward. Targeting main key terms is no longer viable from any business perspective. The cost is too high on the PPC and the cost is too high on the resources to get there from standard SEO strategy. However, the long-tail still holds about 80% of all searches. This means that there is still a wild wild west of opportunity out there no matter what Google has done with Universal Search.

Stay tuned for more on this.