Universal search promises to bring exposure to content once relegated to limited audiences and savvy surfers. Universal search requires businesses to adjust their approach to search engine optimization.
Businesses looking to optimize for universal search need to broaden their content horizons and look beyond optimization of just their website content. Anyone who knows anything about search engine optimization knows that content is king. Having keyword rich, keyword relevant, spider accessible content is critical to successful search engine optimization and optimization for universal search success is no different, there’s just a lot more to optimize.
The content mix of universal search results is diverse. Businesses will not only compete for position with their competitors’ websites in the search engines results page (SERP), they will compete with videos, blogs, podcasts, news feeds and more. So the broader the spectrum of online content a business can produce the better their chances for success in gaining high placement in universal search results. That being said, simply producing video, audio or blog content does not ensure success. Just as with website search engine optimization, video, audio, RSS and blog content should be optimized too. Businesses should place keywords in their video, audio and news RSS feed’s title and meta description tags, submit local listings, leverage web applications like Googlebase and consider creating a widget that can make their content available to search portals like iGoogle and myYahoo.
The bottom line, integrated, optimized, online marketing communications equals universal search appeal.
