Universal Search/Ask.com

What a day. Or two. There’s a lot to take in from the Search Engine Strategies conference. If you want to see a great recap of roughly everything, I'm leaving links to the SERoundtable site, which is doing the complete play by play of each speaker. I will keep my comments to what I think is salient and useful for us right now.

As for my own impressions, I want to talk a bit about Universal Search. (Wow – now I’m talking like a panelist!) Universal Search has been with us for only about four months, and it is already the talk of the town. In case you don’t already know, Google’s Universal Search is a neat new way of unifying all vertical search platforms – web search, image search, video search, blog search, news search… In a search for a specific topic, the cream of each of these search platforms turn up on a straight Google search.

It really is a great idea, and the other search engines have followed suit. Try a search (for a popular subject at the moment) on Yahoo!, MSN and Ask, and you will see some similar incarnation of this principle.

This means that SEO campaigns now MUST focus on more than placing keywords in text on pages. It will now require the same attention to the images and videos and press release items. So far, that optimization resembles what we used to do in 2000 – tagging and naming pages and creatives so we can inform search engines that the page is relevant. Links will keep them convinced of this.

Fortunately, link building for a page will help anything on that page. If you have a page optimized for a term with images and video tagged for that term on the page, the links that page generates will help all three show up in Google, even for the same page of results. What’s more, since visitors generally love images and video more than straight text, these will make it easier to actually get those links.

In short, Google will now reward you for putting goodies on your page.

Interveiw with Jim Lanzone of Ask.com on SearchengineRoundtable.

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Ask, even though their results always seem questionable. That being said, their choice of layout for their page really is nice. If their upcoming algorithm change can improve the results, so much the better. Should the succeed in getting more people to defect from Google to use their engine – which, honestly, is unlikely – you can start thinking about buying paid search links from them.

For the time being, however, Ask is the Paris Hilton of search – absolutely beautiful with operating capital to spare, but somewhat useless.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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