What Universal Search Is & How to Optimise for it

Glen Allsopp / Leave a Comment / August 28th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

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.

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