Hey Guys and Gals, all the rage yesterday was the launch of Google Universal – people are calling for the demise of SEO as we know it. Of course, this is the demise of traditional SEO — well, for a certain type of SEO. If you’re an SEO who is just looking at yourself as an SEO and not also a marketer, that is where the demise will definitely occur. SEO’s that also understand marketing will be fine. So what if Google shows videos, maps, local results, and books in the SERPS; as an SEO, you have to learn how to get your clients optimized in areas that are not just algorithmic. Optimizing a video with tags and metadata and creating a video worth actually looking at that will attract links and comments is just one way to tackle this issue. Being that it is Google though, I doubt we’re going to see many Revver videos; we will probably see more Youtube and Google Videos in the SERPS. I would also recommend making sure that you are optimized for Google product search (used to be Froogle) as when/if products or product links show up in SERPS, you’ll want to be there.

For example, if I worked with a business selling the iPhone on SEO, the old way to optimize for iPhone was pretty straightforward. Do a search now, and you’ll see not only is news being incorporated into the search, there are videos too. See samples below:

There are videos as well (courtesy of Youtube, a Google Property need I remind you)

And that is not all:

I would try to get my client in Google news (if they had something newsworthy). Can you say PR SEO?

I would admittedly have to start to understand the patent search and see if there are opportunities there, too.

If a real blog could be developed around the iPhone with real news and something of interest, I would try it… maybe a video blog (hosted on Youtube) showing people using the features? (I don’t know; This is an off-the-cuff blog post.) Getting a hybrid blog + video would allow us to tackle both of these.

Lastly, I would list their products in Google Product Search (assuming they had products related to the iPhone).

In summary, I guess you could say that Google is turning the SEO world on its head, and that is exactly what I LOVE about search; it constantly changes, keeping you on your toes. Throw in personalized search and wow, these next 12 months are going to be fun! (I hope.)

We’ll have more on this, but Microsoft just bought aQuantive (owner of Avenue A) for $6 Billion, with no plans to spin off the SEO company. MSN owning an SEO company… this could get fishy with DoubleClick being bought by Google (DC owns Performics who also does SEO).

A recent blog post LeeAnn Prescott - Research Director at Hitwise - brought some interesting demographic info on users of Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, that got me thinking.

I always felt in my gut that people using Gmail were “with the times” and early adopters, comfortable with adaptation and change. SEER is constantly hiring and looking for our next superstar and those who submit resumes from Gmail always get a slight “OK, they are in the know” from me.

Back to the story…LeeAnn’s blog post validated my gut feeling; here are some of her findings:
Gmail users are much more likely to:

• Be Young
• Have a high income
• Be in the early adopter segments

Here are some of their findings for the four weeks ending 4/28/07:

• 54% of visits to Gmail were from users between 18 and 34 compared to 42% for Yahoo! Mail and 44% for Hotmail.
• 18% of Gmail’s visits were from those with average annual household incomes between $100,000 and $149,999, compared to 15% from Hotmail and 13% for Yahoo! Mail.

I started thinking have I ever taken an assessment of our percentage of Gmail subscribers to our e-mail list? When you consider that Gmail only started allowing open subscriptions in February of 2007, it is pretty nutty to look at their market penetration, as of today here is our e-mail subscriber breakdown:

• Gmail: 4.5%
• Yahoo! Mail: 2.9%
• Hotmail 2.1%

If you are thinking, OK, So what…here’s what:

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Back in February, Laura wrote about 10 tools she cannot live without.

I’d like to write about one tool that has changed how we produce work at SEER. SEO audience beware, this has less to do with search and more to do with common problems we all deal with when sharing files between people in an office setting.

If you have more than two authors on your word, excel, or PDF documents, you know how troublesome it can be to control efforts between people. Which is the newest version? Did I remember to email Jane my newest copy?

I almost cannot remember dealing with those problems after using subversion–also known as SVN–for the past few months.

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