SEO for Google Universal Search
Earlier this month, Google introduced a new “Universal Search” system, a radical change to its search results pages that will show listings from its news, video, image, local, and book verticals much more frequently. This article considers how the webmaster should respond to this innovation, considering both traditional “asset optimization” and strategies specific to universal search.
What is Google Universal Search?
The so-called “Universal Search” is a system that will expose Google images, videos, news, local and book searches much more frequently alongside regular search results. These so-called “search verticals” have taken on a much larger part of SEM’s attention in recent times, and with this, the topic of asset optimization. Universal results appear via OneBox (family) links at the top of the SERPs or through inclusion in the regular results themselves.
Universal Search is, in fact, nothing new. Anyone who has used the A9.com (Amazon) search engine will be familiar with search engines that display results from different verticals side by side. Recently, Ask.com has also launched its Ask3D concept, which similarly (and perhaps more elegantly than Google) displays results, as they put it, “in all three dimensions of search: Expression, Results, and Content.” Ask, in fact, provides a good idea of where Google may go in the future: ask.com.
While Ask is a sure winner for submission, it only has a small share of the search engine market. However, when Google (as the market leader) starts to implement something, people tend to pay a lot more attention. In fact, the increased maturity of the web probably means that the time has come for Universal Search. We will follow these developments with interest. However, suffice it to say that successful SEO going forward must take into account the placement of assets (particularly videos) across all Google verticals.
Asset Metadata Optimization – Office Files
In the future, when people search Google, they’ll get an ever-widening range of results, including more links to videos, images, news, maps, and books. However, let’s start with a challenge that has always existed, and often hasn’t been given enough attention by the average webmaster; optimization of Word documents, Excel workbooks, Powerpoint presentations and Adobe PDF files.
Try typing a Google Search on Tony Blair file type: ppt and look at the results. You’ll probably notice that while some of the result links make reasonable sense, many others are of the “slide 1” or “Lecture 29” type. This is because Google uses the title field of property metadata. The description field is extracted from the body of the document. The same principle works for Excel files, presentations, and PDFs.
If you have Adobe PDF and other office files on your website, I recommend reviewing each one separately and using the file properties menu item to enhance your metadata; (a) add a meaningful title, (b) add a topic, (c) add keywords, and (d) if you can, rename your asset filename to also include your keywords. For example, tony-blair-iraq-dossier.ppt is better than plagiarism-v1.ppt.
Optimization for Google Video
Search engine optimization for video, since the launch of Universal Search, has become one of the most exciting challenges in the field. Getting it right is remarkably simple, and in many ways simply an extension of the same principles we’ve seen for optimizing MS-Office files (so start by using a keyword-rich filename and title, from the summary tab of file properties in Windows explore).
Google Video supports uploading of AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, and Windows Media files (pretty much all the extensions you’re used to). The frame rate must be greater than 12 frames per second and the bit rate must be greater than 260 kbps. Google will crop your video to fit a 4:3 frame and display it at 320×240 resolution using a Macromedia Flash object. As such, if you’re preparing your video from scratch, try using the 4:3 aspect ratio (to avoid arbitrary letterbox cropping issues).
There are two ways to upload your videos to Google Video. If your video file is less than 100 MB, the easiest and fastest way to upload it is to use Google’s web-based uploader (at http://upload.video.google.com/). If your video is larger than 100 MB or you want to upload multiple files at once, the Google Video Uploader client software is your best option (currently at https://upload.video.google.com/video_instructions.html). As a general guideline, keeping your video to 4.5 minutes or less should make the whole process much easier.
Note that if you upload from the web interface, you can specify the title, description, genre, and language of the file in advance. For the title field, simply repeat (perhaps with more extension) the title you used for the file properties dialog. For the description, follow the same principles that we covered in the meta description tags section. Select an appropriate genre (eg “business”), set access to public, and click to upload your video.
Once your video is on Google (or YouTube), you can get the code to embed the video on your web page. Usefully, this means Google is hosting and serving the video instead of you (saving on your computing power and bandwidth charges).
This is the Wild West frontier of SEO, so have fun. You might find this to be your fastest route to the top 10 (at least for now, until spammers get a hold of it!) Drop some backlinks to your video, get your friends and colleagues to vote for it on Google Video and see what happens. You may surprise yourself.
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Universal Search is more than Office files and videos; In my blog, I look at Product SEO (via Google Base) and optimization for Google News in more detail. In a previous article, I discussed optimization for Google Earth and Google Maps using KML files. For more help, go to my forum, and good luck with your Universal optimization efforts!