Merge

The new Google, or Google Caffeine, officially launched to the general public on May 5.  It claims to be faster and more relevant, and apparently it is.  So what's it mean to you?  It may be a little early to tell, but let's make some predictions anyway. 

1.  Your website is not enough. OK, so we've been beating this dead horse for years, but the new changes at Google should speed this trend up (and of course they'll get the credit, but whatever). With keyword searches now yielding more relevant results for blogs, video, photos and yes, social media (ahh, the cacophony of SM gurus everywhere rejoicing), it will become more important than ever to look beyond your website. We already know that the more mediums you are using currently (assuming good content and linkbacks), the better your overall SEO. I imagine this new feature will only enhance it further.

2.  Speed kills. Or does it? Google announced recently that site speed will be factored into the search ranking algorithms.  My prediction is that this won't affect your overall SEO a great deal with all the new features.  The opportunity to create more relevant content seems more important to me and will play a bigger factor in your site's SEO.

3. Old school PR gets a new school feel.  Releasing your news via a press release seems decidedly old fashioned.  Given the new emphasis put on real time results, either from news releases or twitter for example, the time-honored technique of the press release will become more important.  To speed up your process, look at a site like pitchengine.com, a pretty cool tool with nice analytics. 

4.  Slice and dice.  The ability to drill down by category with the new left hand nav is nice, but in my opinion it won't be widely used. At least for a while.  It will be important to keep the content coming, but my feel is that the vast majority will use Google the old fashioned way. 

Bottom Line:  While I don't think this will change how the world searches, do look for content generation to expand even faster than it is, for better or worse.