I’m sure you’ve seen Google’s new search engine results pages by now – very interesting! As a user, there are now a lot more obvious options for getting results from Google in the left hand column. These options have, of course, been available for quite some time now – it’s just that they were sitting up in the left hand corner of the screen and weren’t so obvious. Results from blogs, for example, were hidden in the ‘more’ options and so a lot of people probably weren’t even aware that this was an option.
But what effect is this going to have, if any, on companies trying to get rankings on Google? Quite a lot! Why? Well, if it’s much more obvious for people to be able to refine their results by clicking on ‘images’ or ‘blogs’ then that’s what people will do. So, getting rankings on Google’s normal web results pages is going to be just part of the battle. Getting results on the ‘images’, ‘blogs’, ‘news’ and ‘map’ pages is going to become increasingly important as more and more people explore these results.
How will this be done? Through a lot of effort and applying appropriate seo strategies for each category. Getting listed via Google Maps requires the use of Google Places (formerly Google Local), the blog results (obviously) require a blog that is updated on a regular basis with appropriate keywords. Google Images? Well designed pages and good use of Google Sitemaps will get you on the right path.
The bottom line here is that we’re going to have to work harder to get Google rankings across all the different categories of Google Search – are you ready?
As a separate footnote, what do you think of the new search results pages? Do you like the layout? Will you be more likely to use the options in the left column?