Google have launched a more refined Google Search to help people find the relevant pages they are looking for. This is needed more than ever for searchers as the number of unique pages indexed by the search engine grows by millions a day, adding to the one trillion pages already in existence according to a 2008 calculation. Apparently, the new search options have been implemented to allow users to refine searches according to fixed parameters such as date range and types of result. This means that SEO strategies are going to have to change if optimisation companies want to keep traffic up for their clients’ sites.
Google Search
It is already known that SEO companies have to work hard to guess how Google indexes pages, and no one really knows how the algorithms change and evolve to favour relevant sites. One of the most important points however to maintain a high ranking is relevancy, and this is where Google Search will be making SEO specialists work for their money as well as their page rankings. Google Search allows searches to be narrowed down through options such as videos, blogs, forums and reviews so that users can access exactly what they are after. There is no doubt that this is a move geared towards satisfying internet users.
SEO Strategies
According to others in the industry, optimisation will also have to start pleasing people, not just such engine spiders. Out will go ‘Google fodder’ and in will come people friendly content, especially as ‘rich snippets’ play a part in attracting traffic to a site once listings appear from a search enquiry. Rich snippets are written into the coding, moving away from HTML and toward XHTML. This allows extra, and essentially more relevant, information to be crawled and presented to the searcher. This may not satisfy the spiders, but it will increase traffic.
Searchers vs Spiders
By bringing structured data to the surface, SEO companies will be optimising for the people; but what about the search engine spiders? It transpires that the date and time filtering options have been the most popular. This can mean only one thing – fresh content needs to be added to web pages if companies want to stay ahead of their competitors. With news that the filtering options could be refined to ‘the last minute’ and ‘the last second’, this could be a tough job, as spiders will be indexing more rapidly for fresh, user friendly content.
SEO vs Google
Constant updating will of course have to be paid for, and between big brands this could mean a whole army of SEO specialists working on just a handful of sites. Ultimately, Google Search has been developed to keep Google the number one choice for searchers through providing the most relevant results; the tight parameter options are testament to this. As a result, successful SEO will rest on meeting the new set of Google algorithm rules – whatever they turn out to be.
Related posts:
New content has always been of utmost importance for Google bots and the algorithm. I agree though that it is becoming even more important with the onset of new search options that Google is offering. I also believe that Google is changing in other ways that is going to make it tougher for SEO companies to stay afloat.
This is a great article by Aaron Wall on the future of SEO… where it’s been and where it’s headed.
http://www.seobook.com/seo-where-it-going
@Joe
Thanks very much for your insight. I saw that article and found it incredibly interesting. There is so much in there however perhaps it is best summed up by saying that Google is continually trying to find ways of pushing people toward paid search from organic SEO solutions. The internet is founded on the concept of sharing information in the form of content and all the social media integration or real time search will not change this. Quality content will still be the deciding factor in gaining search engine rankings. Where this is true, there is content and coding to present in the most compatible manner possible and companies need consultation on this. You need only look at Twitter Search to see the chaotic nature of realtime results which are effectively unfiltered; relevancy can only be assessed by indexing. Optimisation is not about manipulating search results but formatting a site in the most compliant manner possible to acheive organic rankings. As long as this is true, SEO will remain an essential part of any search engine marketing campaign.