SEO or search engine optimization until recently mostly involved just the regular organic search. Website owners optimized their business websites and pages for better web visibility of their web pages. This type of regular organic search displayed only the web pages. Other specialized searches like image search, blog search etc did exist but these were used by the majority of the people and it is true that there are many people who were not even aware of such alternative options for search being available. So every business website cared only about optimizing their website with just the regular web page searches in mind.
However, today we see the emergence of a new form of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) where the results are displayed that blend all the different searches and displays are not just the web pages, but also includes videos, blogs, images, news articles , and other media that are available online.
Many online marketers are seriously considering a shift in their SEO and marketing programs and have started optimizing their websites for blended universal search results. Why the sudden hurry? Ever since May 2007 when Google started rolling out their Universal search pages, other search engines have also started working on developing Universal searches. Google's SERP has started showing up Universal search results more often and we can be sure that very soon we will have more of Universal search results being displayed by all major search engines and this may soon become a standard practice. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, as well as some minor search engines are also known to be working on launching their versions.
Here is a list of the different types of blended searches;
- Image Results
- Online Video
- Blog Listings / Results
- Book Listings
- Recipe search
- Local / GEO Search Listings
- Product Search
- Catalog Search
- Movie Search
- Music Search
- Map Search
- PDF files
- Health Search
- Celebrity Search
- Financial / Stock Search
- People Search
- Job search
- Comparison Search
Optimizing for Blended or Universal search would mean, optimizing images and news items also to appear during a keyword search. More importance has to be given to blogging, consistent addition of new web content, the ALT text and image size, video files etc.