Have you been doing daily searches for your favourite keyword trying to see if your company is still ranked on the first page? You may have seen changes in your ranking or even other weird listings above yours like video, news or maps? The fact is, your site may have disappeared off the first page altogether?

And yes, this is cause for concern, especially if you are a search marketer and having to “please explain” to your clients. It also makes things slightly more uncomfortable, in those monthly status meetings, when there are articles floating around the Internet, with headlines such as “Is SEO Dead?”, “Why Organic Search Does Not Work Anymore” etc. In an interview at the end of last year, Google’s very own Internet Guru, Matt Cutts, was quoted as having said “I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be” Hmmm… a little worrying especially when you have not got all the facts.

And having said that, there is much more to all this hype and the world of organic search (SEO) is most definitely going to change and hopefully we can help clear the mystery up for you.

So, as you may or may not know, there are many factors resulting in organic search rankings going up and down, all relating to SEO, but for today, let’s look at three other reasons that influence search rank and help demystify all the SEO speculation currently doing the rounds.

The first two, Universal Search and Personalized Search, have been around for a while. The third is an “all new” feature from the Search Giant Google. Let’s quickly recap on the first two and then go into more detail on the third.

Personalized Search
The search engines are customizing search results for each individual searcher based on their search history, geographic location, or other demographic factors. Google reorders your search results based on your history of past searches, giving more weight to topics that interest you. Personalized search is offered as an option whenever you sign up for a Google account, which you need to use AdWords, Gmail or other Google services. This change makes it futile to focus on search engine rankings alone, because the ranking will vary depending on who’s searching.

Universal Search
Rather than the traditional 10 links on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), search engines are serving up other types of content that is relevant to your search query. In May 2007, Google announced the first steps toward a universal search model that will offer users a more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online.

With Universal search, or Blended search as it is also called, Google aims to ultimately search across all content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. These results will include information from a variety of sources including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results.

This is all fantastic news for the searcher, but again, less so for the site owner or SEO consultant who is trying to get a site to rank well. Thus, while optimizing web pages is still important, if you aren’t creating and optimizing a wide array of digital assets, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to get your brand in front of searchers. You have to look at marketing your site or brand via video, images, news, maps & books. To top it off, you have to create content that is interesting, something people will love to read or view.

And finally, SearchWiki. Say hello to number three
Now there is a totally new way to personalise Google searches. SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. Say What! Yes, you can now delete search results you do not like, promote the ones you do like to the top of the listing and even comment on them.

These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search while signed in to your Google account and Google stores your changes in your Google Account, at least until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Well, that just throws the baby out with the bathwater!

Although, what is worth mentioning here though, is that personalised search is only available to Google users who are “logged” into their Google accounts, so essentially it is not a collective representation of all of Google’s users and their search users in general. So there is a massive amount of users not accessing this data or making a contribution towards it. So maybe, just maybe the baby is being left behind…. for now.

What most online marketers are now starting to work towards is a more holistic strategy when it comes to Search Marketing and the challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, but to focus more on traffic and conversions. As a business, traffic, conversions and ultimately sales should mean far more to you than ranking alone.

However, in the same breath though, SEO would just not be the same without rankings. Face it, search is a totally measurable marketing technique relying on ranking positions to determine its failure or success. And with personalised search, organic rankings just don’t have the same importance as they used too… or do they?