How Can Content Publishers Benefit From Google’s Universal Search and blended search results?
Universal search and blended search results are a very important new trend which every website owner and online marketer should be aware of. This article explains what it is, what it means to you and how you can act to benefit from it. What are Google Universal Search and Blended Search Results?
Many people don’t realise that Google has lots of search engines which index different types of content into separate databases. These include:
However since mid 2007 Google has started to combine the results from all these search engines into their main web search results pages. They call this integration Universal Search and the enhanced results pages are called ‘blended search results’.
This is what they look like:
Google believes that this approach is working well and has been rapidly increasing the number of searches that include blended results. ComScore reported that in March 2008 17% of Google searches contained blended results. By November 2008 the number had increased to 31%.
As a result of Google’s success the other leading search engines - Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask - are now following suit.
What Does This Mean For You?
The bad news is your search engine marketing activities are now more complicated than they were before.
The good news is very few marketers or online publishers understand how search is changing so there is a real window of opportunity for you to get ahead of your competitors. If you understand what Google includes in search results – news, images, maps, video, etc – and optimise all these assets on your site you will get more page one search engine listings, which will result in more good quality traffic.
What Is The Size Of Impact and Opportunity?
Jupiter recently produced some research which revealed that search engine users click specialized content listings - maps, images, video, etc - within blended search results more often than they click specialized content that they have found via the specialist search engine e.g. Google News Search
- 36% click "news" results within blended search results
- Only 17% click a "news" result after conducting a news-specific search
- 31% click "image" results within blended search results
- Only 26% click an "image" result after conducting an image-specific search
- 17% click "video" results within blended search results
- Only 10% click a "video" result after conducting a video-specific search
If these specialist bits of content displayed within the blended results get clicked so often it is worth you investing the time to get your content listed.
How Can You Benefit From Blended Search?
The goal of every internet marketer is to get their web pages on the first page of the search results. As Jupiter points out 68% of searchers click listings on page one of the results and fewer than 8% look beyond page three.
Universal search gives you the opportunity to get page one listings for dozens of new keywords and phrases and to leap frog your competitors. Image, news and product results often get placed ahead of the organic results.
Here are lots of tips and tricks to help you optimise each of the different types of content on your site:
Images
Image search is huge now. Here are some tips to improve the traffic you get from the images on your site:
- The Google search spider cannot tell what is in a picture (yet!), therefore it has to rely on the information you provide to index an image.
- Name your images in a way that describes what they are. An image named angelina-jolie.jpg will do better than the same image named pic123987.jpg. Tip: Use dashes between words rather than underscores
- Always give images an “alt” or alternate tag. Most image editors allow you to do this when you upload the image to your web page
- If you can, add a caption to your images. This greatly helps the search engines understand what the image is about
- Link to images from within other articles with anchor text that describes the image content e.g. have a look at this image of Brad Pitt
- Add images to all your content pages (articles, press releases, blog posts, functional pages, etc). The nearer they are to the top of a page, the more likely they are to be indexed by Google
- Add images to the photo sharing sites (Flickr, PhotoBucket, etc) and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc). Make sure you tag and describe the images accurately
- Quickly add images to your site that are relevant to current stories
- Set up a Google Webmasters Tools account, verify your site, click on the ‘Diagnostics’ tab and select ‘enhanced image search’ and ‘include my site in Google Image Labeller’. The latter allows humans at Google to manually tag your images
- Make sure the folder in which you are storing images is not blocked by your robots.txt file. Tip: It is still worth storing navigation and your website design images in a file that is blocked from the search spiders, and storing article images, product photos, news pictures, etc in folders that the spiders can index
- Monitor how many images on your site have been indexed by Google by going to Google Image Search and typing ‘site:www.yourdomain.com’ in the search field
- Finally remember to go back through old pages and optimize all your existing images
Videos
Videos should be treated in a similar way to images
- Make sure the video file name is descriptive of the video subject and content
- Add an ‘alt’ title tag and descriptive tags to all videos
- Create individual web pages for each video with a permanent URL. On the page write a description of what the video is about ensuring you repeat the important keywords in the heading and body text
- Submit your videos to YouTube, which is owned by Google and gets preferential treatment in their video search. Also submit to other video sites which are given an equal treatment by the other search engines
- When you upload to YouTube (and the other video sites) make sure the descriptions include keywords that describe the video content
- Google takes into account the number of comments and the rating on YouTube when indexing and deciding on a video’s results ranking
- Inbound links and the number of times a video is embedded into other websites is also taken into account
- Tip: If you host your videos on your own server they are unlikely to get listed by Google, so you still need to submit them to YouTube
- Add your videos to your social network profiles (FaceBook, MySpace, etc.)
News
If you get a story on page one of Google News you can generate thousands of visitors for your website. Unfortunately it is tough to get your site added to the Google News search index but it is worth a try if you produce unique and timely news reports
You have to submit your site to be included in Google News at
http://news.google.com/ , but before you do this make sure it complies to Google’s requirements. I have provided some tips below, but Google also has there own help pages at
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ :
- Each news story must have its own domain name which does not change. Google News will not list pages with multiple stories on a single page like on most blog home pages. It will also not include URLs where the page content changes
- Google News will only index articles which have a URL containing a unique number consisting of at least three digits. One exclusion is a year date e.g. 2009. This rule is waived if the site has a Google News Sitemap
- The articles must appear on a page within your main domain (not link to a page on a different domain)
- You must have more than one person contributing news to your site
- The site must have an RSS feed
- Your site should have a Contact page which you should submit when registering your site on Google News
- Google News does index videos that are submitted to YouTube, but they don’t index any multimedia content on your site
- Google struggles with dynamically generated pages with .asp, .php and question marks in the URL. You are much better off having static pages. Remember not to have the same content on a dynamic and a static page or it will be excluded by Google on the grounds of content duplication
- Google does not follow Flash, image or JavaScript links. They will also not list news stories which are embedded in a JavaScript page
- Send out press releases through recognised PR websites such as PRWeb, PR Newswire, and PR Leap. They automatically submit to Google News
Products
If you sell any products from your website you can list them with Google so that they get found by people doing a product search. Product results are also added to blended search results.
The advice below is aimed at sites which just have a few products that can be submitted manually. If you have hundreds of products you should consider using an ecommerce platform that is Google Products enabled to automate submission
- Go to Google Base (http://base.google.com/base/) , login and register your product(s). Make sure you use a complete description to increase the chance of your product being found. For example if you have created an ebook called ‘SEO Guide’, try labelling it as “SEO Guide: Search Engine Optimisation, Internet Marketing and Traffic Building for Blogs, Content and Ecommerce Websites”. Warning: only use relevant keywords or it will be considered to be spam and could get you banned
- Add as many attributes to your product descriptions as you can. Searchers often search by attributes. For example, T shirt, 100% cotton, washing machine safe, three sizes, small, medium, large … you get the point
- Tip: Include some misspellings in your product descriptions e.g. Bosch and Bosche (along side the proper spelling). They can generate a surprising number of results
- Make sure you always update the product descriptions if the specifications change
- Test, test, test different descriptions to see which ones bring the most traffic
Local or Map Search
Getting registered for Map search is most useful for businesses and sites which are trying to attract a local audience.
- Go to http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter and log in using your Google password. Click ‘Add New Listing’ and add your company or website details. Make sure you complete the process and claim your listing
- Once Google has verified your map search listing you are given the option to add up to 10 images and 5 videos which will be associated to your map result. Its worth doing this
Conclusion
By understanding Universal Search and blended results you can drive more traffic, leap frog established competitors in the results listings and appear on page one of the search results for far more keywords.
You have a window of opportunity for a short period of time to get a real advantage with your search marketing.
Go for it!
