Working on a report today, I was noting the analogy of what is going on in the world around me with the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout (see Bailout Talks to Resume After Impasse and Government Seizes WaMu and Sells Some Assets) and relating that all to Google and Search Optimization, both Paid and Organic.

Suddenly, I had one more association to make about Search Optimization – “Leverage”.

That’s right, “Leverage”.   It’s been all about leveraging Search Engines to get traffic (think, other people’s money) – the engine is there, but do you use it efficently, does anyone?

While we have one main Search Engine, “Google” which pretty much powers the majority of searchers – the main leverage that Google has – that a hell of a lot of people use it to search, almost 75% of all searches are done on Google now.

So …. instead of calling this stuff “optimization” why don’t we call it what it really is ….. leveraging a market of people who are searching – making sure your using leveraging all that search activity and point it your way.

However, then you get into a issue – leveraging Search might not be the same thing as delivering visitor value and delivering visitor value might not be the same thing as doing well in Search.

A problem, to me, with most search engines, is that they don’t deliver much value past pointing you to the landing page; but any attempts to make the landing pages better (ie: Google Gears, Google Knol, YouTube in Universal Search) position a Search Engine, as something more.

At what point do the search engines become like, say … Paulson’s pratfall … where the Treasury Secretary overreached and started to lose the support of his own party.

But getting back to leverage – the reason why Google works, while other large sites can work, is they have found a way to leverage the traffic -but as we’ve seen, leverage can “dry up”.