Earlier this month, Google introduced a new “Universal Search” system, a radical change to its search results pages that will make listings for its news, video, image, local, and book verticals appear much more frequently. This article discusses how the webmaster should respond to this innovation, considering both traditional “asset optimization” and specific strategies for Universal Search.

What is Google Universal Search?

The so-called “universal search” is a system that will display, much more frequently, Google images, videos, news, local and book searches alongside the usual search results. Thus, these so-called “search verticals” have taken on a much larger share of SEM’s attention in recent times, and with it, the topic of asset optimization. Universal results appear via OneBox (familiar) links at the top of SERPs or by inclusion in regular results.

The 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 next to each other. Recently, Ask.com has also launched their 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.” Asking, 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 much more attention. In fact, the greater maturity of the web probably means that the time for universal search has come. We will watch these developments with interest. Suffice it to say, however, that successful SEO going forward must take into account the placement of assets (particularly video) in Google verticals.

Asset metadata optimization – Office files

In the future, when people search on Google, they will get an increasingly wide range of results, including more links to videos, images, news, maps, and books. Let’s start, however, with a challenge that has always been there, and that the average webmaster has paid insufficient attention to; optimization of Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and Adobe PDF files.

Try typing a Google search on the Tony Blair: ppt file type and look at the results. You will probably notice that while some of the results links make reasonable sense, many others are in the nature of “slide 1” or “Lesson 29”. This is because Google uses the title field from 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 Adoble PDF and other Office files on your website, I recommend that you revisit each of them and use the file properties of the menu item to improve your metadata; (a) add a meaningful title, (b) add a topic, (c) add keywords, and (d) if you can, change the file name of your asset to include your keywords as well. 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 just an extension of the same principles we’ve seen for optimizing MS-Office files (so start by using a keyword-rich file name and title, from the summary tab of file properties in Windows). to explore).

Google Video supports uploading of AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, and Windows Media files (so almost 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 within 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 include your videos on Google Video. If your video file is less than 100MB, the easiest and fastest way to upload it is to use the web-based Google Uploader (at http://upload.video.google.com/). If your video is over 100MB 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 guide, keeping your video to 4.5 minutes or less should make the whole process a lot easier.

Note that if you upload from the web-based interface, you can specify the title, description, genre, and language of the file in advance. For the title field, just repeat (perhaps longer) the title you used for the file properties dialog. For description, follow the same principles that we cover in the meta description tags section. Select an appropriate genre (eg “business”), set public access, 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 that Google is hosting and delivering the video for 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!). Add some inbound links to your video, get your friends and colleagues to vote for it on Google. Video and see what happens. You may be surprised.

Conclusions

Universal Search is more than Office files and videos; On my blog, I consider Product SEO (via Google Base) and optimization for Google News in more detail. In a previous article, I reviewed optimization for Google Earth and Google Maps using KML files. For more help, please visit my forum and good luck with your Univeral optimization efforts!