Posted March 11, 2009 by Brett Miller

Wow! Loaded question. One of the most asked questions by my clients goers like this... "My website went live last week and I'm still not on Page 1 of Google? What gives?" The first thing I try to let them know is A) Google is a business, not a democracy, and     B) Google shakes up their own apple cart constantly, so what may work great one week or one year may be ineffective now. Some things to keep in mind about Google... they take their users seriously. It's their goal to give their "clients" the best sites that fit the search terms entered. Google loves websites that are information rich and which are updated on a regular basis and not stale with the same information year-in and year-out. They also seem to like sites that deliver new media content like audio and video. A recent article from Broker Agent Social that I've some clients sending me called "Page Ranking is Dead"  states that Google, as it did over 300 times last year, is planning to unveil an updated algorithm, and that this one is going to change things dramatically. As the article states about Google's new Universal Search feature: "This will be the most significant factor of 2009. Google looks at soundtracks and convert them to text. They can jump into the middle of videos, scan sites to determine if you have video/images or not. There are a lot of variables in universal search, and some of these variables tell how engaging your site is. What will be scary to those casual users, is if you don¹t have video and your competition does, you¹re going to see a big shift in rankings. If the top ten sites don¹t have video, they may lose their ranking over night. There is no question about it. Getting placed at the top of the search engines will change from what we have known in the past. The real question is: what are you doing to stay ahead of the competition?" Dang! I just saw a DVD called "Eagle Eye" where a computer is able to translate a voice's sound waves reflected off of someone's coffee into text. (For us older folk, we remember the HAL9000 reading an astronauts lips.) A great value for creating easy videos for the web is a company called Real Estate Shows at http://www.realestateshows.com . For $125 per year, you can unlimited videos created from your own digital photos. It's a very fancy video slideshow which pans the pictures in a "Ken Burns" type way which is very nice. You can easily add a soundtrack, captions, and... voila! Internet movie ready to use. RealEstateShows.com even connects directly to your Realtor.com So we can begin to pick apart and find out what Google has done, it is much harder to figure out what they will DO.  The best thing you can do is create a quality website, with excellent content that people find, go to and return to often. Trying to beat the system is tough to do and stay ahead of, especially with where Google is concerned.  ------------- Brett Miller is founder of HoopJumper® Websystems and helps his clients create quality websites that visitors come to and return to.  To find out more about his products and services, visit www.HoopJumper.com