Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

My final Tuesday session at SMXEast in New York addressed “Universal & Blended Search Opportunities.”  Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land, moderated the session. Highlights from the speakers include:

Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
Nobody was using news, blog, images and vertical services directly so Google jammed them into the regular search results. Blogs don’t show up as much as news, video results. Optimize your titles for SEO – use a keyword or two at the beginning at the title.  Optimize your images!

Eric Papczun, VP of Client Services, Performics
Take full advantage of how to exploit the results to dominate the page results for your brand. How do we tell our story before others try to tell it for us (possibly negatively).  BE PROACTIVE!!!! If you have a quicklink, see what is on that page. If it loads slowly people may bounce off.  Constantly create news about yourself and refresh it often.  As news updates throughout the day, push it out.  Attack the noise around your brand.

Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo!
Blended search is all about little doorways that go to the content of the web. You can leave it in the search engines’ hands or take it into your hands. Use Search Monkey – blending data inside a result – partners to enable you to manipulate your listing in the yahoo search results: reviews, pictures, social info, etc. Also use Search Pad — can tell when you’re doing research and enables you to add notes that you can print out and take with you or post on Facebook, etc.

Jack Menzel, Google Product Manager, Universal Search, Google
It’s all about relevance. It’s not a window for people to abuse.  Get people the answer to queries fast, comprehensive, and best summary of the content.  Things will become more and more local, which is a source of a lot of quality win.
Search is far from solved. There are still lots of things that need to be fixed. Make sure Google can find your content!

As searches become more sophisticated, the engines have to be able to provide the best information to answer the query. Universal or blended search provides video, blogs, pictures, etc. This session provided useful information on optimizing that content.

– Stacey Morgan Smith