Universal Search Threatens Search Engine Rankings

Thanks to Rich Brooks for giving me the heads up on an interesting post by Lee Oden on the Online Marketing Blog entitled The Small Business Guide to Optimizing Universal Search.  Just when you thought you had gotten your website up in the rankings, the search engines have come up with another way to mess with them.

But really, it seems that google, yahoo, msn and ask have all been busy developing new ways to get better results for their search engine users.  They all have come up with changes to their search capabilities that are being referred to as "universal" searches.  In these searches, it's not just webpages that are featured, but graphics and video as well.

So what does this mean to your website?  Well, if you've gotten somewhat comfortable in your rankings, it may mean that all of a sudden you're status will go down, because there are videos or photos that may rank higher.  Now this is great for sites or businesses that use these formats on a regular basis, but not good news for others that depend upon content, especially small businesses who don't require video or images and have smaller budgets.  Read Lee's entire post here.

-Susan Martin, Marketing Coach NYC