SEO for Universal Search

Do you optimise for universal search?  I should probably first ask if you’ve heard of universal search.  If you haven’t, here’s a quick run down.

Universal Search is what most engines seem to be experimenting with these days.  Universal Search has to do with the sort of results being fed back to a users when they perform a search query.

To clarify further, if you search for London Hotels on Google, Yahoo, MSN or ASK you would be presented with results that include not only text and pdf documents but also images, videos, blogs entries, rss news feeds, podcasts, social topics, wikipedia definitions, etc…

Universal search is still in its infancy but it seems like its creeping up on us.  Currently Ask seems to be the only engine currently fully adopting universal search but Google has also been secretly experimenting with it for a few years now and slowly introducing it to us, allbeit - in a much more subtle way.

So back to my original question, do you include universal search as part of your seo strategy?  If you don’t then its a good idea that you start, otherwise you will lose out to your competitors in the SERP war (rankings).

How to perform SEO for Universal Search

1- Think Content

To optimize for universal search first you need to think about your (or your client’s) content and think about what sort of content is currently used and what sort of content can be introduced.

Traditional content includes:

• HTML
• Flash
• PDF
• Images

Untraditional Content might include:

• Videos
• Podcasts
• RSS
• Maps

2- Optimize traditional & untraditional content

Now that you thought about your content, make sure you not only optimise your traditional content but also optimize/introduce your untraditional content too.  This will enable you to be in a better search engine position for more/all content when a user performs a query.

I will discuss how to optimize untraditional content in future posts.