You may think that YouTube is the only game in town, but it is not. Google, and to a greater extent Bing, source hundreds of channels to populate organic universal  SERPs. This post shares data from our study to reveal the extent that platforms (YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, etc…) comprise unversal SERPs.   The second installment will be offered as a white paper download next month. It’s a blockbuster featuring a correlation study of query intent, tagging, and how the combination effects a video’s chances in Google and Bing SERPs. We’ll announce the white paper’s release in a SearchEngineLand article in early April.

Which Platforms Get Results
All over the globe, marketers long to see their videos display in key search engines for important keyword searches. The objective of this portion of the study was to understand what video platforms are sourced the most by Google and Bing in universal SERPs and in what percentage. We understood YouTube would play a significant role, but how big of a role and do other platforms even matter for ranking in universal SERPs?

To begin we identified 978 keywords using the YouTube keyword research tool. These keywords were selected based on their search frequency under 24 pre-defined categories.

We then ran the keyword bucket in both Google and Bing and documented every instance of video thumbnails and associated data in the SERPs. The same keyword set was put through a number of video sharing platforms and 1st page SERP ranking for each video was recorded.

Tested platforms:

It’s important to understand video is displayed in very different ways between Google and Bing universal SERPs. Within Google results we saw video thumbnails in 11 different formats or video “packs” being displayed. Below are a few of the variations we came across in Google.

Google Packs

Bing on the other hand only showed one formation, a pack of four.

What Were The Results?
We understood coming into the study YouTube would play a significant role in both Bing and Google and the data confirmed our beliefs. What’s interesting to note here is the percentage breakout difference between search engines. Not only that, but in general video was returned far less in Bing than in Google. The keyword set used here brought back a total of 2051 videos in Google and 156 in Bing.

Google Universal Video SERPs Platform Allocation

The ‘other 10%’ consisted of over 100 different video sites as well as sites internally hosting their video. These sites ranged from Vimeo, Howcast, Hulu, College Humor, IGN, to name a few.

Bing Universal Video SERPs Platform Allocation

Welcome to today’s first SearchEngineStrategies NYC 2010 breakout session on the Beyond the Crawlers Track, Digital Asset Optimization.  Moderating this session is Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite and set to speak are Mark Knowles, President & CEO, Pixelsilk, Inc., Chris Boggs Director, SEO, Rosetta, Josh Cobb, Sr. Director, Publisher Revenue Optimization, Yahoo, and Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing.

Mark Knowles is up first to talk about the opportunity and fear of universal search and digital assets. Let’s travel back in time to 2003 when Google filed the first paten for a universal search web interface. Some questions came to mind:

1. How are we going to present different data to users?
2. What constitutes categories that need to be represented differently?

Nowadays all the engines are getting into universal search, taking multiple elements into account simultaneously: image, audio, video, news, blogs, product listings… it just goes on… and local search is a whole other ballgame. Do a search for “deli” with an NYC IP address and all of a sudden you’ve got local listings on the regular SERPs. So it’s not just super tech websites that are affected by universal results- it’s small auto-body shops, mom and pop eateries, boutique clothing stores…

Still, the question surfaces once more:  is this important?

Mark noted that Bruce Clay said it had significant impact on what he’s doing. And Adam Audette, along with the rest of us (god willing) are starting to look at SERPs as much more than just ten blue links.

The goal should be to get your team to understand how things show up in the search engines. There is a very real opportunity emerging. Should you invest? When? How? The benefits of optimizing for universal search results seem obvious but then in comes fear.

Overcoming the Fear of “The Second Click”
This can be quite a hurdle for some marketers. Your brand comes up in the SERPs. That’s great. But then thanks to Google’s wide reach of multimedia properties (YouTube, Picasa, Product Search etc.) when users click on a blended search result for your brand, they’re still within Google’s bosom.

“All-things-Google is probably not good for us,” Mark said. “But you have to remember - Google is a business.” If Google goes down the tubes, which is a potential fate for every business, you should still be in control of your brand presence in universal results. This is why overall optimization, especially of digital assets, is so valuable.

Recipe for Success
Mark used the example of a trip to the grocery store to illustrate his point: when people go food shopping, they usually show up with a list. Lists are generated from recipes they’re working with. How can you make this work to your advantage? Cosco, for example, created a recipe book Thanksgiving weekend that basically organized the whole shopping experience for customers, subtly pitching, of course, their own Kirkland products.

This concept stretches across the board for all types of businesses. Yes, even Google. Google purposefully acquired a zillion properties to help make the user experience more cohesive. Is Google to be feared? Mark says, “No.” Remember, they’re a business, and every business will eventually grow or die. Right now, they’re still growing. That is why seizing the opportunity of DAO optimization is so important.

Next up is Chris Boggs.

When it comes to evaluating the opportunity in optimizing digital assets, SEO experts look at optimization as a whole composed of three main parts:

1. Technical optimization
2. On-site optimization
3. Off-site promotion

There are dozens of choices as to where you can invest your resources if you want to be holistically optimized. Like every other element of business, there is one goal in mind: ROI.

It’s essential to remember that there’s no one-size fits-all approach. Some verticals may or may not be aligned with optimizing digital assets.

In the universal search landscape, optimizing to get your homepage images or videos right on the SERPs can certainly help your pages in general rank because they contribute to the overall footprint of your site. Links start flowing in through more natural and hollistic patterns of content, and rather than just having text-based links, you now have powerful anchor text surrounding your video and images.

Here are some questions you need to ask when approaching digital asset optimization:

1. Do a lot of high performing sites in my vertical  leverage non-text content prominently?
2. Would my target segments benefit from digital assets including video, images, podcasts, etc.?
3. Are there additional legal compliance issues to be addressed?
4. Do I have the funds to create and optimize content that may not be as easy to track ROI as paid search and organic search?

Ultimately your goal should be to assess what type of content you aim to deliver users and decide what forms of content would provide the most value. For information that’s a bit dry, such as tax advice, perhaps a fun but educational video would be most effective when reaching out to users. Users searching for medical conditions (think: “weird bump on my 5 year old’s neck”) are often appreciative of images they can compare and learn from. Decide what type of digital assets would best serve your audience, then create and optimize the heck out of them.

Josh Cobb takes to the podium next.

It seems Josh was a last-minute addition to this panel (his name was not in the itinerary), but a welcome one indeed. “It’s been about six or seven years since I’ve spoken publicly,” he says, mentioning that he’s “never felt so recorded before” what with 78% of the room snapping digital cameras, tweeting presentations verbatim… oh, and quite literally, flip cameras abound.

Josh takes us through his 4-fold approach to optimizing digital assets:

1. Take an inventory of your digital assets. Of course, consider user-generated content and internally generated content, but consider your online audience as a digital asset as well. Things haven’t changed: the person with the biggest, bestest thing usually wins. Google has the biggest index. It often wins. The LA Times had the largest archive of print material that wasn’t online for a long time. When they created digital archives, they stole the show.
2. Sort your inventory accordingly. There are four main groups: commercial value, editorial value, entertainment value and added value.
3. Align these assets and their values against the user, advertiser and publisher experience.
4. Build a test for all of your marketing assumptions, user behavior, and technical limits.

Regarding monetization, think of it as work for users. Ads organize our thoughts in exchange for perceived or actual value that users expert you to deliver.

And when it comes to deciding what to deploy, these are the main three profiles:

1. Long term, loyal user base
2. Highly transactional sites (e-Commerce)
3. Pass through traffic

The next priority is when to deploy.

• Most importantly, don’t be afraid.
• Take things little by little, but be meticulous.
• Set your goals, be ready to measure things.
• Go after 80% of the opportunity you discover- don’t burn yourself out trying to capture all 100%.

As Josh said, “Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.”

Face it- on the Internet, you’re either ahead or behind- you’re never on time. So stop trying to be. The best you can do is understand that users are going to choose for themselves. Just try to make yourself the most attractive choice .

Lastly, you must understand how to assess deployment:

• A/B testing
• specific goals
• proper rotation of users
• statistical and temporal relevance
• isolated
• specific begin/end
• specific owners and roll-back plan

And how will you know if your assumptions are correct? Make sure you’re measuring results at the baseline. Leverage third party analytics packages and internal custom data analytic tools- everything from Excel to MS SQL to SAS. Investing in a trusted, knowledgeable analytics staff is a wise choice, too.

Key metrics include:

• revenue / RMP / CPM
• session length
• CTR of all contente assets
• return users whole page yield

Last up is fellow Minnesotan, Lee Odden.

Universal Search was really born in 2007. But now three years later, the search landscape is different. We still have all the same digital assets, but now we have to weigh them against  personalized, social and real-time search. And lest we forget mobile search… even though mobile only represents about 3% of search, the smartphone adoption rate is sizeable, and thrusts another card in the mix we must consider.

Lee’s point is simply this: it’s all marketing! If something can be searched, it can be optimized.

Here’s a breakdown of Lee’s DAO Content Strategy Pyramid:

• Keywords - leverage PPC KW research as well as social conversation keywords. It;s really smart to understand what keywords and what concepts people are talking about in social environments, and the vocabulary they’re using to describe them.
• Personas - who is your audience? What are their behaviors? What are their needs? What are there interests? Where are they in the buying cycle? Do they prefer images or video?
• SERPs – evalute the serps – what shows up? wheres the opportuunity? its not static.
• Asset-  assess what you have. What’s already there? Online as well as offline.
• Editorial - make sure you create a content plan.
• Mapping - create a map for the keywords that relate to the content. This is just regular SEO but it takes digital assets into consideration.
• Operationalize - integrate this into your regular process.
• Off-page DAO - add digital assets, such as video, right on your site- but you better be sure yo’re promoting it across a variety of platforms.
• Promote - leverage RSS, email marketing and other forms of direct marketing.
• Measure - make sure you take traditional metrics into consideration as well as social media metrics, both front and and back end.

Lee like to build up the blog as a centerpiece to which all your social channels point towards. Of course he does. He’s got a beaut under his belt, TopRankBlog.com.

Holistic SEO In Action

Here’s a little case study Lee and the TopRank Online Marketing conducted last year:

1. Their Goal: build keyword authority, leads.
2. Ideal Keyword: “social media marketing”
3. Buyer Persona: fortune 1000 companies, corp marketers
4. Already in SERPs: web pages, blog posts
5. Ideal Assets: blog posts, images
6. Off-page Assets: Flickr, StumbleUpon, etc.

What They Did

• Asked 25 top dogs in social media marketing the same 8-10 questions (some interviews were even done by video)
• Took answers from one topical question (specific SMM tactics)
• Optimized content and published
• Promoted post via social media channels, RSS and email

The result? 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips a.k.a. a totally hot, beloved post with incredible SEO value.

IMHO this was a wonderfully insightful session to kickstart my week of goodies here at #SESNY. Be sure to stay tuned for our coverage throughout the conference, and follow our live tweets @beebow, @MerryMorud, @MannyRivas and of course, @aimclear.

For better or for worse, mixed media or “blended” search results pages are probably here to stay. If you assume that raw authority is going to guarantee you a first page result  for a hot news story or push down a viral video that’s harmful to your brand, you should probably just quit now think again. Will you blend?

For those of us who consider mixed media SERPs as potential opportunities, SES Chicago 2009 put together a fantastic panel of experts with tips on using the blended results to ours & our clients advantage. Whether you are promoting a product, selling a service, or protecting a person’s online reputation, the Mixed Media SERPs session gave away some absolute golden advice.

Moderating the session was SES advisory board Member Andrew Goodman. Up first was Larry Cornett, VP of Yahoo Search.

An Overview Yahoo! Search Mixed Media SERPs
When Larry thinks about search, he’s thinking about little door ways to sites on the web. Clicking on a link is like opening a door. About a week and a half ago Yahoo launched a universal header to guide & blend data, even before the search page

Yahoo are also bringing quicklinks & data into the universal search header. On the SERPs themselves, Yahoo is pulling in a diverse array of sources. Larry shows a SERPs for Black Eyed Peas (for some reason) images, music, data (Wikipedia) & deeplinks complementing algorithmic results. Yahoo also uses blending in their image & video search as well. With search monkey, Yahoo is also blending at the search result level with user reviews, photos etc.

In regards to ads, Yahoo wants to have more of a brand advertising experience rather than just text based. This includes thumbnail images, video results, additional links.

Blending is also going on within Yahoo’s various applications. During a query, Yahoo is deciding whether you’re doing  full-on research or just a lookup & they are changing the types of information displayed in the SERPs – apps like Search Pad, even Twitter or Facebook options may appear.

What is the Value of Mixed Media SERPs?
It’s a more comprehensive experience. Is the query for a breaking news story, an athlete or a product? We don’t always know what a user wants, so we need to make it easier to help the user to get what they “might” want. Yahoo also thinks their use of blended mixed media SERPs are good for SEO’s, offering more unique opportunities to rank and engage users.

Questions Blurted Out for Larry Cornett, Outside of the Structured Q & A Session
Q: Are video thumbnails in blended results going to be a optimization opportunity?

Larry: We actually do video playback on the search page, which is a little bit different than you’ll find in other search experiences. How that gets ranked and featured depends on the SEO.

Speaking next was Matt Siltala, founder of Dream Systems Media

Mixed Media SERPs- What’s Your Angle?
If you’re not taking advantage of these mixed media opportunities you’re not helping your brand. The straight ten normal algorithmic results, that’s not the way it is anymore. Whether you love it or hate it, blended search doesn’t seem to be going away. This is an important opportunity for brands.

What is Mixed media?
Matt used Andy Beal’s example of a recent good example of mixed media – just look at a Google search result for Tiger Woods. Half of the results are mixed media.

How Does this Help Me?
You want to know about what your customers are looking for, when to use blended results and how to use them properly, right? Research your audience first – use Yahoo answers, local review sites, Flickr -  just a few avenues for research.

Find out what people are asking questions about: What are they looking for review on? For blogs posts on?  For videos on? Use this to advise what content you create to serve users in the mixed media SERPs. Matt types a few queries into Yahoo answers to get ideas for content, for videos, images – cool tactic.

With shopping results, you should look at the networks that products show up in blended & join them. With press results, do a competitive intelligence on where your competitors get press & then go after those outlets.

Pay attention to review sites in the SERPs. It’s important to tell customers where to send their testimonies, just as important as asking in the first place. (Do not fake reviews!!!)

Taking the podium next was Dave Naylor, owner of Bronco Internet.

Blended Search Results in the UK
Are blended results proactive or non-active? Look at a keyword terms like “Guns”, you can’t PPC this. How do I get on the first page of Google, when there’s Wikipedia there, there’s a video there, there’s local gun shop results there? The organics don’t actually start until way down the fold.

Blended Search Pro – Blended search enhances user experience, and it’s good if you’re trying for a term like “Guns”.

Blended Search Cons – Dave says he had a client crying because he lost 25% of his clickthrough after his site became part of local search. Ouch.

Some Blended Search Strategies
Create a Google News sitemap, an about page, submit it &  then cross your fingers. Dave says he’s gotten into Google News so many times it’s ridiculous.(Matt note: actually that’s very impressive)

Get in Google Local Listings. Simply fill in your form to add your local business listing. Ensure you add as many categories and make sure you get reviews (even if you pay for them).

Create a product feed and upload to Google Base. This will help your products show up in search results. He finds this to be very effective for long tail results.

Youtube Videos – Dave hates these, his achille’s heel. For him it’s very hit and miss, hard to get consistent results with video. He generally likes to embed the video on the website and send a lot of traffic or post it as a response to other videos.

Image Results – His top traffic term is an image result and it doesn’t have anything to do with SEO. Make sure you add alt text and that the image links to an image actually. He’s also found that many people who come to his site via images do not convert, they’re at a different stage in that cycle.

Dave note’s that blended searches are inconsistent, your CTR’s are likely to fluctuate a lot.

Query Deserves Freshness
Tiger Woods was a perfect example of QDF. This allows certain keywords that are trending to be updated in realtime. This makes rankings difficult and temporary but the newer your content, the higher it ranks.

Query Deserves Diversity
With the research model (something like “guns”) you’re not going to get QDF unless there’s a big story. You will see a mix of information, commercial, pages, news, blogs, images, videos. Google will promote alternative things to the front even if they don’t “rank” high.

Up next was Mark Knowles, president of Pixelsilk

Fear & Opportunity
Mixed Media/Universal search is becoming more prevalent all the time. Right now, do a search for “New Moon” and you get theatre, news, image & video blended results.

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Greetings from the Big Apple! This SES New York 2009 session is all about keeping tabs on ever changing  advancements in universal & blended search- and what it means for marketing. The moderator is Kevin M. Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair, CMO, WebVisible, Inc.

Olivier Lemaignen, Group Manager, Global Search Marketing, Intuit
Polls the audience to see who “knows what search is” and looked at how the interface evolved from a simple little box to lots of ways to search. “Go into each of the search categories (“verticals”) and find exactly what you’re looking for. Video, shopping, local , book, images, blogs and news are all examples of vertical search categories that are included in “blended” or “universal” search.

These verticals look different at each search engine but “all the engines are going the same way.” “This is a trend that advertisers need to look out for” as regards the impact of the SEO process. The percentage of people being exposed to universal results is increasing and it’s changing click behavior. There is a “drastic reduction” of users clicking on traditional results when blended search is available.

He quotes Enquiro Research to show the evolution of the golden triangle effect (upper left side) to a more fragmented eye tracking pattern. “There are not sexy videos out there for accounting software.” He quoted various universal search classic “warrants served for Chinese food restaurants” and speaks of the “business implications of universal search. Don’t ignore the implications of universal search.

Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! SearchTodd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corporation

He spoke about the “intricate language of chocolate.” If you know the language, you know what you’re getting. If not, you might not be happy with your chocolate. He sees search results as the same. “Is the search result relevant for what I’m looking for?”

He sees blended result as “taking a little bight out of chocolate” to “take a peek” at what is in side. He showed a music artist results that shoed a shortcut, enhanced listings, news and videos. There is a media player at the bottom of the page, demonstrating Yahoo’s most “extreme” example of a blended page. He asks, how do we best serve the user by delivering a search results that totally serves the user. He showed the “Joe Shanghai” search result for New York, blended search within search characteristic of Yahoo’s Search Monkey technology.

the result includes Yelp rating, address, phone number, etc… Publishers collaborate to get structured data in the resultto give results which respond the the “meaning behind the link.” Now it’s easy easier. He shows a video of Hulu’s video with pre and post roll, right in the Yahoo search results. Some Yahoo SERPs actually have power point and Flash games. It is done by “just adding a few lines of code.” Literally it’s a few words of code, to give Yahoo access to your results in their blended results.

This changes the business for advertisers are palpable. Open the Victoria’s video right on the SERP. For users it’s about much more comprehensive search results. They need the information so this is about “helping them get what they’re trying to accomplish a bit faster.” This is unlike any other time in the search engine history, users have complete control over their listings.

“A traditional search result does not show the power” of a Yelp results. Get more qualified clicks because those folks clicking are are vetting content more first. It’s an “incredible” opportunity.

Todd Schwartz
He loves this blended search panel. It’s important to keep in mind the history of search, a relatively new market that’s been around for 10-15 years. There were only a 100K websites made up of users who liked more browser navigation and structure. Over the last 10-12 years there has been an explosion of content, with tens of millions of sites. There’s more than 50 billion terabytes. Users need to access the content. As the complexity of the data and user grows, a richer search is called for.

Deliver Better Results
Users are becoming are becoming more sophisticated and customers “engage deeply” in tasks and using search to help. 50% of queries are “long sessions” for research, shopping, travel, products and services. People are coming back to tasks over and over again. The same types of trends occur in the blended search results. Searches around entertainment, shopping, travel are common.

Blended search pays in giving users the best results possible and helping them with tasks. Todd showed the MSN blended results for “Oscars,” which is a “great result” to bring terrific insight to the query. Next he cited “March Madness” as a good example of bringing in “structured” blended data. He did the same for movie including news results, the trailer and other related content.

Simplify Tasks
He showed results that stem from their acquisition of FareCast, bringing very specific flight and other travel information extremely close to the services. Weather, traffic (including a rich map with traffic overlay) and flight arrival times compose an “end to end” experience in the vertical.

• More and more engagement with Search
• Reach more customers
• Higher ROI

Keith Hogan, Vice President, Search Technology, Ask.com
The thing that he “gets the most enjoyment from” is analyzing user and session logs. Search users are broken into 3 areas: discreet task completion, investigation/research (50%) and entertainment/exploration.

The primary motivation of discreet task completion is the reduce the distance between the searcher and the answer. Search engines also blend to inform users about non-blue link features and reduce the depths of some “deep dives” in the investigation/research mode. In the investigation research mode, not every query is useful for this purpose.

In the goofing off mode, users are pretty much likely to “go anywhere” so Ask puts material to “expand” users’ horizons.” Search engines often will aggressively promote blended content to expose and embedded feature like Ask propietary Tv search features. In the research mode, SERPs can be “enhanced greatly” by bringing content closer to the surface.

Hello to all, Manny Rivas here at SES Chicago 2008. I’m thrilled to be here providing coverage for aimClear Blog. Thanks to Sandy Prouix and the whole SearchEngineStrategies team. The weather is cold outside but the energy in these sessions is great!

In the Universal Search session, industry buffs Dr. Larry Cornett, Mike Grehan, Chris Blakeley, Todd Schwartz & Jack Menzel spoke of the evolving search landscape and bringing comprehensive SERPs (search engine results pages) to the user. The session was moderated by Kevin Ryan. Mike Grehan of Acronym Media & Chris Blakeley of comScore gave thoughtful insight into the implications of blended search & paid placement on user trends.

There’s no denying that blended search has added new dimension to the SEO process & made it essential for marketers to consider multiple verticals when publishing content.

According to Chris Blakely of comScore, Inc., blended search will continue it’s push into new vertical categories, moving penetration closer and closer to critical mass. Chris noted in particular that users are clicking on sponsored links less and less.

“There is an explicit need to maximize all digital assets to grab more page real estate.”

Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer of Acronym Media touched on the propensity for paid results to dominate the top of the SERP’s, pushing organic listing out of the “golden triangle.” Now with blended search, people are paying less attention to well written title tags and heading directly towards  video thumbnails. It is imperative to feed content to the outlets that universal & blended search have now deemed as the “standard.”

Dr. Larry Cornett, Vice President of Consumer Products at Yahoo! showed how the new model utilizes blended search to create a richer more structured experience, providing heavy sums of information on one search.

The Yahoo! SERP now contains several “shortcuts” to allow the user direct paths to desired content in an effort to better represent what’s beyond the blue link. In many instances the SERP now serves as the destination, giving users the option to listen to songs or preview trailers without ever having to leave the result page.

Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager of Live Search at Microsoft Corporation examined the evolution of search behavior. He noted that people are engaged in longer search sessions and are using search to complete their tasks.

Todd sees the key to accommodating these users as “simplifying key tasks and drilling down to the core of what they’re looking for.” This model of search allows publishers & advertisers more room for engagement & broader reach as well as facilitating higher ROI.

Jack Menzel, Senior Product Manager at Google spoke of comprehensiveness, relevance & presentation as being at the heart of universal search. Comprehensiveness speaks to employing several verticals such as images, maps, news, products, videos, books and more in the SERP.

Data collection allows Google to run each query against every index and determine a better suited, more relevant result for users. Lastly, presentation deals with summarizing the content in the most efficient way possible & keeping the results easily scan-able. A great strength of universal search, according to Jack, is their ability to capitalize on the relevance of all categories to find what is best for each searcher.

The world of search is constantly evolving with the goal of providing searchers with a better experience and quicker answers. The task for search marketers is to take advantage of the new model of search and engage the community with content that speaks directly through the appropriate verticals. Unversal search is the now and future.

Not Your Mother’s SERP
It’s a a brave new world and we can expect to see less and less website results on page one. The good news is that the evolution of search always presents opportunities of great proportions for those who research and understand proper methods to get content into the SERPs of the day. Also, classic SEO values remain inalienable and the best content rises to the top. The major difference now is in the quantity and segmentation of focused channels.

3D from ask.com integrates vertical results for, what many consider, a seamless search experience. Microsoft and Yahoo integrate vertical search for basic SERPs. Google calls it Universal search. This important shift signals changes of significant proportion and marketers must adapt.

Classic SES Presentation
The Moderator of this session was Chris Sherman. Everything associated with Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman feels a bit nostalgic here in San Jose, this being the last SES event they’re sequencing. The premise of the session was that users still flock in astounding numbers to find information from search engines and their niche specific verticals. Since the engines have gone universal/vertical a reverence of how content is indexed across “repositories” of content segmented into products like Google News, YouTube, Yahoo Travel, Flickr, and Blogs is essential.

Ses San Jose 2007
Searcher Track | Universal & Blended Vertical Search
Moderator : Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Greg stressed this is the most important change in search history. A major percentage of what SEMs used to know just became obsolete when Google rolled out he most radical change to its search results ever earlier this year! Even based on early analysis there has already been a profound impact.

Every Body Bail!”
Greg quipped that there is a “crises” coming and you’ve now been “warned.” Tagged are screaming into search results making it essential that marketers utilized picture optimization tactics. Blog results are splashed prominently and shocked PR department types may not be handling associated Internet investor relations nightmares at all. Photos can be unflattering. There are hundreds of categories, dozens of major engine verticals (niche’ specific search engines) and Greg secretly believes that there is a picture-tagging smear campaign being waged against Hillary Clinton to make her look nasty.

Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online spoke of Universal Search as a huge trend which has dramatically impacted SEM thinking. After discussing the basics he spoke about Yahoo, MSN, and Ask’s idiosyncratic compartmentalization of vertical products in the SERPs.

This is huge challenge for marketers because the search cheese has moved in ways never really experienced in the past. Google is the gigantic game-changer again. If you’re lucky enough you have digital assets in an area like video, recurrent content, graphics, blogs, news, and other worthy universal spider bait…great. He noted that many companies are naturally rich in certain digital assets.

Sherwood’s Studied Video in SERPS
His analysis as to the effect of proper video tagging, page SEO, page rank, comments, and video popularity reveals that all of these factors matter to Google results. Google Zeitgeist as been replaced by Google Hot Trends, a set of 100 daily hop topics computed automatically. Google is likely custom tuning it’s indexing process for each and every portal. Bottom line: Google Universal Search is in flux and always will be. It’s the nature of search.

Bill Slawski Director of Search Marketing, Commerce360 presented next. I’ve read SEO by the Sea for over 6 months and can recommend the feed. Bill addressed the question of how business can get into Universal Search Results. Like the other speakers he provided a number of screen captures reflecting the evolution of MSN, Yahoo, and Ask 3D channel integration in search results over time. He noted that blended results can include images, blogs, products, ads, timelines, definitions, Q&A, local search travel booking, business locations, and a growing number of other categories

Fractions of Queries
Ranking in vertical databases are dependent on many on page language factors, technical variables, and like organic search has always been subject to parameters which are both known (Google tells us) or are black box secret stuff. In the olden days (like…last year) Web Position Gold (Which is truly dead) was the way to measure. Now it takes serious research. What appears on SERPS are triggered by the way a query is phrased and/or search operators used. For instance starting the phrase “What Is” is more likely to trigger a question and answer type response.

David Bailey, Engineer, Google
Universal Search is an extension of Google’s original mission, a single search box where users can rely on the results. People have busy lives and there’s not always be time to bookmark sites or longer research processes and Google excels at single search result quality

Google got where it is by providing users the best results which remains the primary focus-fast, simple usage, and with an interface people understand Algorithms now dig deeper for relevant results through “repositories” of content with the end goal being smarter ranking. David telegraphed (without going into specifics) that popularity is in fact dialed into the black box.

Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Tim began by theorizing that it’s hard to differentiate one search engine from the other absent the branding. Yahoo’s goal is to move towards a better optimized user experience through integration of verticals, shortcuts, and inline shortcuts which blend expanding menus of verticals within one search result.Moving forward it’s about understanding the intent of the user and what content will be stimulating to that audience.

Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
Ask3D SERP designs are different than conventional search starting with the fixed left bar (fixed-remains static even as you scroll) and the Smart Answers. The default SERP is a more portal based approach with elements like weather and news in content block format.They claim large jumps in user satisfaction which they’ve measure in both site analytics and surveys. Ask’s data notes an increase in vertical channel activity and conversion from first-page results. They incorporate AskX Eye Tracking to identify hot zones on the page.