SEO 2.0. What is Universal Search and how do you optimise for it?

May 26, 2009

Google Universal Search represents the next logical step in search engine technology. It is a simple technique and still in its infancy, but it demonstrates the future way in which search engines will display their search engine results pages (SERPS).

It was originally conceived by Google product manager Marissa Mayer in a brainstorming session during 2001 where she presented mock ups of how she envisaged SERPS with images and videos interspersed within the normal text results. It has evolved since then in beta format, mostly behind closed doors, but has occasionally been let out into the wild for testing and has caused much debate over the last couple of years.

A press release was published in May of this year announcing Google’s move towards universal search and I have been monitoring the roll out of the technology with much interest.

Google Universal Search has recently become the default SERP albeit with varying degrees of saturation depending on which data centre was being used to serve the results, the geographical location of the searcher and, to some degree, the actual search query used.

A well known universal SERP is for the query “Darth Vader” where you will see image results at the top of the page – actually above that will be desktop search results if you have the correct add-in installed and you are actually sad enough to have information on Darth Vader on your PC, but we can ignore that for now – Beneath the image results you will find normal text link results interspersed with videos from You Tube. At the bottom of the page you will find product search results from Froogle and an option to refine the search (dependant on how much of the universal search has been rolled out on to your data centre).

What Google giveth with one hand, Google taketh away with the other.

This leads us into a whole new raft SEO techniques to take into account universal SERPS. The new SERPS will give alternative routes to the first page of Google via multimedia optimisation, which is good news. There is of course another side to this which is that there simply isn’t enough space to on the SERPS to list the traditional top ten ranked websites along with the multimedia results. It may be that only 4 or 5 standard web links appear in the SERPS along with image, video, blog etc links.

So, SEO enters a new phase. SEO 2.0 I’ll call it until a better name comes along.

As well as the standard website optimisation which traditionally covers textual content, we now need to optimise for the following content that is currently being used in the universal search or is in beta and likely to appear in the SERPS at some time in the future.

• Blogs
• Images
• Video
• Maps
• Geo Targeting
• Froogle
• Google Local
• Timelines
• Financial information
• Google base

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