The new buzz word in search engine optimization is universal search; it’s the idea that search engines will return not just Web pages, but also images, audio and video as part of a search engine results page. This is already happening at Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
For businesses both large and small, that means your search engine rankings might be at risk. As new media appears in the search results, your Web pages may get pushed down or even off the first page. All this upheaval may prove beneficial for other companies, however, who are putting up content to photo and video sharing Web sites, such as Flickr and YouTube respectively.
There’s a great new article by Lee Odden titled Small Business Guide to Optimizing Universal Search, which goes into more depth about the changes at the major search engines as well as giving some first steps small businesses can take to optimize their content for the new universal search. (Thanks to Carolyn who forwarded me the article.)
Will Universal Search hurt or help your business?
It all depends whether you choose to embrace change, or hope this is just a fad. Smart companies will be looking at ways to leverage their content, by creating how-to or product demo videos and uploading that content to a site like YouTube or a competitor.
It’s a brave new world people…are you ready for your closeup?
