The Impact Of Universal Search

Web 2.0 has been the major topic of conversation for website owners, advertisers, and bloggers for some considerable time now. The concept of web 2.0 is that the Internet and the web pages found within it will become more user guided with greater user interaction and user based tools. Blogs were perhaps the first widely used incarnation of this with the many image and video sharing sites, and social sites like MySpace, quickly following in pursuit. The result is a drive away from static, text based sites, to much more dynamic pages that actively encourage visitors to get involved.

Ask And Universal Search

At the same time as web 2.0 has been touted and even witnessed to a reasonable extent, the search engines have had a job to try and keep up. The problem for search engines was that their indexing and ranking systems considered only textual content but web content now comprises much more than just text. Perhaps unexpectedly, ask.com stepped up to the plate, with AskX and more recently Ask3D.

Universal search like Ask3D provides a wide range of content types within the search results. As well as traditional results for text based websites, there are also news, blog, video, image, and even audio results presented in separate sections. For the searcher, this provides an excellent, all round set of results and makes finding relevant and useful information much quicker and easier. However, for the Internet marketer it opens up a whole new set of questions on how to optimise a specific type of content.

Blended Search Results From Google

Google's own search results are slightly more blended, rather than the segregated sections offered by Ask. This means that the search engine results page hasn't changed much in design, and still offers a single organic list of results. However, included within that list there is now video and image results. News results and blog posts are also featured at the foot of the search engine results. This means that video is now competing with textual content to reach the upper echelons of the search results.

What These Changes Mean To The Internet Marketer

Whether you prefer the segmented, more formal approach of Ask or the blended, combined approach of Google is largely down to personal preference. Regardless of your preference, it means that websites offering an array of different media on their site have the opportunity to rank in the result pages. It also means there is likely to be a sluice of information on how to ensure that your video is ranked at the top and how to optimise each of the different forms of online media.

Best Practices

Generally speaking, it pays to employ best practices in all respects. Images and video clips should typically have clearly defined, keyword rich Alt tags as well as descriptive definitions. Links to these types of media should also be optimised in the same way as you would include keywords in the anchor text of a link to any page. Any title tags and description tags can be used in the same way. However, it is important not to get carried away by stuffing or cramming these tags with nonsensical lists of keywords. They are there for a reason, and the over-inclusion of keywords is usually policed by the search engines.

Implementing Universal Search Optimisation

Universal and branded search are still relatively new to the Internet. They aim to bring a much more varied set of search results pertaining to a user's query. As well as textual pages, search results will also include video footage, images, news items, blogs, audio, and more. Optimising the content on your site will undoubtedly be a more complex game, but this change in search results also provides a number of means to get a site listed high in the results.