In an article published late last year by WebProNews, Bruce Clay, the president of Bruce Clay, Inc. (an internet marketing solutions provider), stated that as far as SEO is concerned, search ranking is dead. 

He claims that through improved personalization techniques that are being perfected and implemented by the major search engines, most users will now see differently ranked results for a given search term.  Most would think that he is referring to personalized results generated when one is logged into their account on a search engine, but actually he states that personalization will be Web-wide for all users (logged in or not) through the use of third party cookies and other techniques.

This will mandate a huge shift in how marketers track and measure their SEO efforts.  Clay states that marketers must now move to a more holistic approach to tracking SEO that involves monitoring traffic, bounce rates and conversion rates.

Despite the major shifts in search result personalization, Clay believes the most significant factor for search in 2009 will be universal search.  He states that before Google’s universal search, there were 128 variables in the Google algorithm; now with universal search there are 200 variables.  Clay believes that the added variables were incorporated to determine the engagement level of a Web site.  They accomplish this by indexing if and how Web sites are using rich media, such as images and video.  He is convinced that this too, is going to be a big game changer for the way pages are scored by search engines.  He states, “If you don't have video and your competition does, I think we're suddenly going to see a big shift in ranking. I think the top ten sites that have no video, they may lose their ranking overnight, they may disappear.”

We couldn’t agree more.  Contact us to learn more about how video can improve your search traffic.

The original article can be found here.