Optimising for Google Universal
Google Universal Optimisation isn't easy, but we've made a really good start and discovered some techniques which work. But more on that in a minute.
If you're about to hire, or thinking of hiring an SEO company to manage your Search Engine Optimisation, make sure you ask them what they intend to do about optimising your website for Google Universal Search. If they can't answer, look elsewhere, because this is going to be huge and will change the SEO landscape forever.
If you're reading this, then you probably know what Google Universal search is, so I won't go into definitions here, suffice to say I blogged about universal search optimisation recently at reactive.com and on smartcompany.com.au .
Google universal optimisation case study
A client of ours, Melbourne Airport was hit by Universal search results in June 2007. We acted immediately to get them back where they needed to be. We had got them ranking 1st for searches like 'melbourne airport parking' and 'airport parking melbourne' (plus dozens of others), and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.
But in June 2007, Google introduced Google Universal search results which showed local search results on a Google Map. This dropped Melbourne Airport's rank from 1st to fourth. They weren't on the map. That was bad.
We immediately devised a strategy and contacted them straight away. I don't reckon we're the only SEO company to have had an emergency meeting about universal results!
Google Local Search
To be honest, although local search has been around for some years now, we hadn't really considered Melbourne Airport to be a "Local Business" as such. It was a mistake on our part and we apologised to the client for the oversight.
The first step for us was to get Melbourne Airport registered as a "Local Business" through Google Local, True Local and Aussie Web. This got us listed as a local business and we optimised our listings to ensure they were relevant to the keyphrases we were targeting.
It was a game of patience as we waited for the results to come through. What we realised was that there's almost two optimisation processes going on; the first is the normal, everyday, garden variety, Google search results; and the second is the results next to the map (Universal search results). They change slowly over time like the normal results, and appear to do so independently.
After about 3 weeks, Melbourne Airport finally appeared in position "C" (or third). Up to that point we were flying in the dark, we couldn't find any information online from anyone about optimising for Google Universal. Now we knew we'd been on the right track! After 8 weeks, (and a few sleepless nights) they hit the top spot.
The real benefit of optimising for Universal search is the way we've been able to gather more Google results "real estate". By using a combination of Google AdWords, Universal Search, and natural or organic SEO, we've got the client showing for 4 of the top 6 results!
That's a happy client.
YouTube optimisation, Optimising YouTube video's for Google Universal
We're not resting on our laurels though. Obviously Google is placing YouTube videos (as well as other video offerings) into the search results. A quick search at YouTube for "Melbourne Airport" shows you there are hundreds of "relevant" videos that have potential to injected in the Google Results.
We've added videos from Melbourne Airport to YouTube and have began linking to them from other websites. We believe in-bound-link popularity of videos (particularly at YouTube) will help define which videos will show in Google Universal results, not the actual "user ratings" of the videos themselves. Time will tell if we're right!
Google Image optimisation, Optimising images for Google universal.
This is a tricky one quite frankly. We've used a couple of techniques to get images to rank well at Google but with limited success. We've followed Google's image guidelines, which in a nut shell state that you need to ensure you have optimised text around the image you're trying to optimise. So each image should have a caption, and lots of keywords surrounding the picture.
It also goes without saying, create a keyword optimised "image alt" tag (but please, don't go keyword stuffing your 'alt tags'. It's one of the oldest tricks in the 'blackhat seo' book!). It's so passe!
The last thing you should do is login to your Google Account, sign up for a webmaster's Tool kit and submit your site map. Once you've done that, you can submit your site to Google's Advanced Image Search.
This gets the images on your site in front of a crazy crew of Image labelers! This then gives Google human checking of images for search results. Learn more here: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Google News Optimisation, optimising news stories for Google.
We've done some interesting work with www.crikey.com.au on this front, helping them get listed in Google news then optimising their site using tagging technology to get them ranking well. Type in ' election 2007 ' to see what I mean.
What we've noticed results-wise is the fragility of Google News results. To give you an example, the other day, a news story about Pamela Anderson's wedding cake appeared 1st at Google for "wedding cake", knocking a client of ours (Ferguson Plarre) result down 1 spot. Pammy stayed there for a day or two, then dropped to 10th. She's now way out of the top 10 and everything's back to normal.
We probably shouldn't get too worried about the impact of Google News results affecting our rankings for sustained periods.
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