SEO Blog

Serving nearly 60% of the overall organic search market, Google is obviously the primary venue in the minds of SEOs. Some might be surprised to learn that between 2002 and 2004, Google controlled upwards of 80% of all search results by feeding Yahoo! and many other smaller engines. Though their actual share of the organic search listings might appear to be down, Google’s information reach and its influence over the web is larger than ever.

According to the June 2007 search provider share report generated by Nielsen/NetRatings, Google produces approximately 58.5% of all listings served to search users. Unfortunately, that stat doesn’t tell us very much about Google’s reach and influence. It does however tell us that Google is the #1 priority for organic search marketers.

Just how large is Google? To say Google is very large would be a great understatement. Maintaining one of the largest indexes that contains web documents of all file types and sizes, Google is constantly growing. In order to generate lightning fast results for any given search query, Google retains a copy of each web document or file it has spidered on one or more of hundreds of central and regional server farms spread around the globe.

Google provides organic or free search results in a number of formats. There are the general WEB results used by the majority of its users. This is the primary basic venue for SEOs. Depending heavily on both on and off-page factors, Google’s organic results are considered by most to be the most comprehensive and detailed though experience can radically vary depending on the user. Google’s organic results are not as basic as they used to be.

Organic results at Google can come from other unique search tools provided by Google including, LOCAL, NEWS, IMAGE and VIDEO searches. In some search results, primarily with iGoogle, references to YouTube videos might come up for certain search queries. With the introduction of Google Universal search earlier this summer, listings at Google are often compiled with results drawn from all of these unique databases.

Fortunately, SEO that works with Google’s general results tends to work for Google’s series of vertical search tools. That’s because virtually every Google application is designed to produce keyword-based search results. Much has been written on how Google’s general web results are based on a combination of on-page (meta data and body-text content) and off-page (links to and from) factors. There are fewer pieces written about how to get information found in Local search, Google News, or Images and how that information might find its way into general search results.

Getting into Google Local/Map search is quite easy. All you need is links and location. Google uses physical location addresses to help pin-point businesses on its maps. Check out results for the local search query: “New York Pizza, Chicago”. The three listings were found when Google followed incoming links from Chicago area restaurant related websites.

Google News is one of the most widely read news aggregators. Getting a site into Google News is fairly simple but there are some criteria that need to be met before Google will review the site for inclusion.

“…in Google News we only include sites that:
- have news content that is original to the site
- don’t solely promote their own activities
- are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors”

Lastly (for today), SEOs should think about Google Images as a traffic driver. Enquisite data has shown Google Images might drive up to 3% of all Google traffic. Any image on a website in Google’s overall index could get fair placement through Google images. Image files will first be associated with keywords already associated with the website they were culled from. SEOs can help the process by applying a keyword relevant name to each image as well as providing a keyword descriptive ALT tag.

Though they are hardly basic, Local/Maps, News and Images are the most basic Google venues for SEOs to work in. Tomorrow I’ll try to tie them together.