Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Understanding Blended Search

In This Chapter

• Knowing what gets blended

• Optimizing products

• Optimizing news

• Optimizing images

• Optimizing video

• Optimizing for local search

In May of 2007, Google released a new version of its search results dubbed universal search. Other search engines followed suit. The SEO industry calls it blended search.

Blended search mixes relevant news, image, video, and other content right into the traditional Web search results on a search result page.

If a search engine decides that some other type of content (a photograph, for example) is more relevant than the top ten Web search results, then the search engine replaces one of those Web search results with the image.

Blended search presents more opportunities for you to grab real estate on the first page of search engine results. Every image, video, and press release you do, as well as your physical location, give you a shot at a Top 10 ranking.

In this chapter, I give you the factors search engines appear to use to rank blended content, and explain why they really aren't that different from the normal Web content ranking factors.

Warning

As with many SEO topics, I could write an entire book on blended search optimization. This chapter is intended to give you the basics. If you want to get more elaborate, I strongly suggest talking to a professional search marketer.

Optimizing Products

Product pages on your Web site end up in the regular search rankings. But you have a second way to get them into the search ...