What Universal Search Is & How to Optimise for it
Universal Search is a term you are going to be hearing a lot more. With a seemingly excellent session at Search Engine Strategies on the subject I’m going to try and explain Universal Search a bit more and why it affects your website. The good thing about Universal Search is that nobody has an advantage over anybody, you can get into it now and you’ll be well ahead of most.
What is Universal Search?
To put things simply, universal search is the inclusion of multimedia into search results. This means things like Images and Videos are not only having their own searchable areas (verticals), but they are showing in the ‘main’ areas for searches on the big search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Ask. Bear in mind ‘Universal Search’ is a label applied to Google only, this same activity for other Search Engine’s is known as ‘Blended Search’.
Universal Search is not specific to multimedia and can include news snippets from Press Releases and blogs, plus links to other search engine services, such as locations on Google being linked to Google Maps. The reason Universal Search is being brought in and is being used is because it’s working. The goal of search engine’s is to bring the best results to the users, and along with personalised results, Google say they have found this to be working well in terms of benefitting the searcher.
Universal Search Examples
I always think the best way to explain things and to help people understand something is to give some examples so here’s a few.
(Click on the images for a bigger view)
SEO London - A search for something that is area specific will bring up a lot of map like results taken directly from Google Maps. People are using area specific searches so these types of results are very useful to them
Hurricane Dean - This currently shows news because people are hearing about Hurricane Dean and want to know about the news relating to the event. In a few days this result is expected to start showing more videos and images (via).
Star Wars Kid - Finally, here is an example of how video is blended into search results. People do want to see video when searching for things that are known as video, universal search caters for this (via).
What Can You do?
- Optimise Images - Try to add images to your content where necessary, of course images sometimes just ‘wont go’. Add the keywords in the image filename, text in the alt tag on-site and also add the title attribute to your images. It’s important that the surrounding text on the page is relevant and is also quality content. These should all be relevant to each other. Don’t just put up a page on a news event that contains just an image and expect to be shown. You want a page that would do well on vertical page results and use the fact that you have an image as an added bonus.
- Make Video - You have a chance to really get ahead of the pack on this one. Of course video isn’t going to show in the main results unless Google thinks that is what searchers are looking for OR provides a good balance to the results. A good idea is to make some video’s outlining tutorials / how-to’s on your niche and seeing how things work out in terms of SE traffic and rankings. Where possible be sure to give your videos a clear description and title relevant to what it is about, especially if it is hosted elsewhere i.e. youtube. If you are hosting the video yourself then also give it a relevant filename just like you would for images.
- Have a Voice - Whether you have the capacity to write the latest news on your site and get into the News areas of the major search engine’s automatically is unknown. You can submit press releases relating to ‘news’ to try and appear in the Google News portion of results, this can include information on your products and services. You can also (recommended) have a web log that will give you the possibility of showing up on blog results; not only that but I suggest all companies to have a voice online in order to share news and information.
As mentioned earlier Universal Search is relatively new so you can start from no information now and race to the head of the pack. I’ll be honest in saying that I even learnt a lot about it just researching it for this blog entry, I find it fascinating though.
Leave a Comment / 
August 28th, 2007 / 
SEO
What the Founder of Dmoz Knows about SEO
For those of you who don’t know, Rich Skentra was the founder of Dmoz, the best known directory on the web and is also the CEO of Topix. Judging by this pretty impressive portfolio it should be no surprise he knows a thing or two about SEO…or does he?
In a recent post on his personal blog, Rich gave some on-page SEO advice for Mahalo, so today I’m going to look through it and see if he really knows what he’s talking about.
Point 1:
Hyphens instead of underscores, Jason! C’mon guys this is basic stuff.
I’ll give Rich some credit on this one because until recently a lot of people thought the same. Search Engine Land confirms now though that this is not the case and all 4 major search engines treat Underscores and hyphens the same. Rich’s blog doesn’t even do this so I’m not sure why he even mentioned it.
-1
Point 2:
Put the guide note under the <h1> and call it <h2>, it’ll do better. Mahalo needs lots of guide notes. Without the contiguous block of text from the guide note, the links aren’t enough to validate a landing. 250 words is ideal but anything is better than nothing.
The text ‘ Guide Note’ is not under anything but I’m not sure if its worth being an <h1> or <h2>, <h2> if anything though. Rich makes a good point, basically what he is saying in that in order for the page to be more than links this block of text under the guide note is important. Beefing this out a bit might help up the quality of the page in the eyes of the Search Engine’s although I don’t think it would make that big of a difference. I’ll explain why at the end.
+1
Point 3:
<title> should match <h1> should match url. Don’t forget to add <meta name=”description”>, this should match the <h2>
On pages I have checked the title is matching the <h1> fine and the URL’s are good. There is currently no descriptions on the search results, which probably should match the guide note as mentioned. Well spotted Rich
+1
Point 4:
Not really seo but a general idea … Reference pages in general are boring. Jason is the supreme master of linkbait… Could each mahalo page be turned into a controversy of its own? When someone biases a wikipedia page, it gets more attention and traffic, not less…
I guess this could work so he scores a point for mentioning linkbait. I do however think that Jason is only interested in creating solid, clean results and would have no interest in stirring up controversy.
+1
Does he know what he is talking about?
With a not-so-serious score of 3/4 I think Rich Skrenta has a clue about on-page SEO and has pointed out some aspects that Jason should take notice of. No matter how much Jason Calacanis wants to go away from doing ‘SEO’, having a description tag is basic web design unless I’ve missed it. With a portfolio consisting of two of the biggest sites on the web when its hard to own 1, Rich is doing pretty well for himself.
Does Mahalo deserve to rank?
I’m not being harsh here but if I’m not mistaken, according to new changes in the Google Guidelines you shouldn’t be allowing search results to be indexed. Maybe it should be up to Google to sort this out and not the webmaster but Mahalo’s search results are still ranking. Of course, it may not be that way for long.
P.S. Don’t go looking over this site. I have some work to do yet 
2 Comments / August 23rd, 2007 / SEO
What Semi-Ethical Linkbuilding Really Is
To understand what semi-ethical linkbuilding really is, I guess we have to go into what semi-ethical linkbuilding really isn’t, that way we can see whether you or I have been going to the dark-side with our linkbuiding campaigns. A link building campaign can actually better the web in my view, it helps the world see a quality site that they may not have noticed before, as the old saying goes ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t really work in online terms.
So looking at what linkbuilding isnt. S-EL (Semi-Ethical Linkbuilding) is not going to the corner of the web looking for places to plant your links, it’s not commenting on edu blog’s without a nofollow tag, it’s not spamming forums with your signature link on show and it certainly isnt emailing random people with some ‘clever spam’ asking them to link to your website.
S-EL is using the webs resources to be able to build links to your site, but still offering something quality in the process, ill give some examples:
Creating a Squidoo Lens, this can add content to the web that wasn’t there before whilst being helpful you can also link back to your website or a clients website
Small Directory Submissions, by this I mean submitting to no more than 50 quality directories in order to start off a good base for the link building campaign. These shouldn’t be directories that accept any site and should regularly monitor old listings
Writing Articles for Article sites, although there’s debate on the quality of these types of links, if they get picked up for the right reasons you can see them all over Google and Yahoo groups. Having a link in an authors box doesn’t take away from the quality of the article and still builds links.
Doing something Original / Unique, this is what I meant by improving the quality of the web. It’s not easy doing something unique that people will enjoy or talk about, but if you do it then you deserve all the use and linkbacks it gets.
Linkbuilding really can be an enjoyable process. Brainstorming ideas on the type of content that can appeal well on digg related to your site, then something more political for netscape then maybe something humorous for Stumbleupon. If you get traffic to the right people you can easily genearte links for any website, don’t go spamming on the corner of the web.
Disclaimer: The reason I mentioned Semi-Ethical Link Building is because I dont believe Link Building can truly be called ethical by anyone, the reason behind link building is often some form of Search Engine Manipulation after all.
4 Comments / August 2nd, 2007 / SEO
Google Finally Accept ‘Optimisation’
I know ive already written this post, but had to restore a backup of my blog so Im just going to write it again. Ive just came back from 3 weeks in Asia and happy to see that when you now search for ‘Optimisation’ on Google it no longer asks if you meant ‘Optimization’
The same goes for searching for ‘ViperChill’ no longer asks if I meant to search for ‘VapoChill’. Its clear Google have made some changes in this area and in my opinion its definitely for the better.
5 Comments / July 19th, 2007 / SEO
What My Builders Taught Me About Link Building
No, these builders aren’t part time SEO’s or helpers in my company; but I am a client of theres, just like the people that we Market sites for are clients of ours. So…whats this got to do with link building and what did they teach me?
One Comment / June 21st, 2007 / SEO
