Google SEO has always been an on-going battle for many webmasters, luckily, Google is taking action. For the most part, Google’s major concern are the users doing the searching, where quality and relevance is all that matters to Google – reason why Google’s algorithm was invented, to get rid of spam and rank high quality sites on top. Google’s ideal goal is to serve users the best relevant results and in order to do so, this involves Geo-targeting, looking at web surf behaviors, and much more. In other words, Google is looking at a lot more factors now more than ever to rank a site. There was once a time where getting a simple link from a trusted source was enough to rank universally for any good keyword, nowadays, it is a lot more complex. Google is now taking into consideration bounce rates, search behaviors, time on site before a surfer leaves, and many more factors to rank a certain site. They are really trying to push webmasters to create better quality content that is engaging for users. It has been noted that back when search engine optimization was still very young, there were only around 128 factors in deciding a site’s rankings, nowadays, the tides have changed and we are now looking at above 200. As you may know, Google doesn’t like to reveal much information on how they rank sites, however one thing still stands clear, is that Google wants to push high quality sites up and low quality sites down. If you take into consideration in adding quality content to your website that has some of these engaging components like pictures, videos, and audio and much more, you are looking at the right path. Quality search is the future and in order to stay in the game of SEO, one must adapt.

Here is a video from 2008 with Matt Cutts talking about the future of Google Search and how webmasters should adapt to the new factors being presented in their ranking algorithm.

It seems that Google is now having another eye on web analytics and now not just on links on determining search engine rankings.

Another video from Bruce Clay at PubCon in 2008 regarding what he anticipates about the future of Google rankings. If you don’t know much about Bruce Clay, you can read more about him here.

In essence, we are now looking at a new field of “optimizing” for the search engine Google. Now, it isn’t just looking at building links to rank higher or JUST on-page optimization, there are many other factors as well that determines a site’s rankings. The more Google becomes more sophisticated, the more factors we are going to be looking at as webmasters. Google is really trying to clean up it’s mess on really trying to eliminate low quality sites that just clog up the search engine results and they are willing to look deep down at web analytics in order to push spam.

And what connection does these 2008 interviews regarding Google search have on us today?

If you haven’t noticed, Google has most recently pushed it’s new caffeine update search results in one of Google’s data center. You can bet that they have been testing some of the factors mentioned in the videos and have incorporated some in their algorithm. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they incorporated social buzz from sites like Twitter, Digg, and Mixx, as one of their factors in their algorithm. Google officially plans on slowly pushing the FULL caffeine search results to their live search results after the holidays. This is just another step further into advance search and Google is willing to take webmasters and users all the way.