Blended search results offer ways to get to the front page of search results beyond just the highly more competitive organic rankings. Sites have opportunities to show up for:

- real-time results
- news results
- image results
- video results
- shopping results
- local results (customers don’t even need to go to your site in some cases)

At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, WebProNews spoke with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, who says companies should still build a foundation in organic rankings before trying to conquer other areas:

That said you can break these different elements of blended results down one by one, and look at ways to have your site perform well in each particular one. Here are tips for image search optimization, for example. Here are some for video. Here are some for real-time search. Here are some for news search.

Back to Cornett’s point about qualified clicks – focus on what makes the most sense for your site. Is focusing on real-time search worth your time? With Google, at least, even if you show up here, your presence will quickly give way to the next in line, and you will be off the page momentarily (although there still may be times when it makes sense to be seen here).

If you don’t have quality video content, video search optimization is not bound to be a very practical use of you time. However, if you do have some good stuff, perhaps you should be heavily focused in this area. I think you get the point.

Of course there are plenty of other factors of today’s search results page that drive users away from the "ten blue links" of organic results. It’s not just the blended search elements discussed above. You’ve also got search suggestions, related search links, location, mobile use, paid listings, search options, and various other elements of the user experience that compete for user attention. This is one reason why the lines between search marketing and other types of marketing continue to blur (consider that users of Google or Yahoo can customize their home pages to accomodate many of their favorite sites, making those just a click away).

Still, that foundation in natural search that Besmertnik mentioned is definitely a big part of the overall picture. I suggest taking advantage of your listings here, and maximizing those, regardless of how well you rank. Things like site links and breadcrumbs come to mind.

Google calls this "Universal" search, but the concept is generally the same among Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Results incorporate different forms of online media. Every day, we see image results, news results, video results, local results, blog results, and more sprinkled throughout search results for any given query. That’s just how it is now.

The nature of blended search requires that webmasters not only optimize their sites for search in general, but for separate and individual search engines. As SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at SES Chicago, blended or universal search results can reduce traffic for "traditional" sites. These results usually catch the user’s eye, and may draw them away from organic listings (this is one of the reasons why local search optimization is getting more difficult).

That said, there are tremendous advantages to blended search results, obviously for the user, but even for the webmaster and/or business.

According to Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products at Yahoo, who spoke on this subject at the conference, the value of blended, mixed media search results comes from:

- a more comprehensive search experience
- guiding searchers to the right results
- a broader range of SEO opportunities
- taking control of your brand
- increasing qualified clicks

Just break it down by the areas you have a shot at ranking in. Can you get indexed in news search? Image search? Blog search? Forgive me for quoting Too $hort, but "Get in where you fit in." Can you do video and make it helpful and relevant to users? Do it and optimize for video. The more categories of media that the search engines are incorporating into results (that you can justify getting involved with), the more cracks you have at additional results page real estate.

Read these articles for more on this kind of thinking and specific tips on carrying it out:

- How Do Google’s New Search Options Affect SEO?

- Google News SEO Tips – Ranking in News Search

- Get More Traffic from Bing’s Image Search

- Rank in Image Searches and Get Valuable, Untapped Traffic

- Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube

- Critical Local Search Factors To Pay Attention To

- Tons of Tips for Ranking in 5 Other Google Engines (looks at YouTube, Image Search, Google News, Maps/Local, and Blog Search)

Have additional tips or advice? Share here.

From the get go, it was obvious the conference was going to spend much of the time discussing what Danny Sullivan and others are calling “Blended Search.” I am not a big fan of the term “blended search,” it isn’t an accurate descriptive term. In my mind when something is blended, a bunch of ingredients are taken and acted upon to create a new product, with the ingredients of that product not being individually identifiable from that point forward. What we are talking about here is not a blended new search results page, but more like a new look, and a re-organization of information from sources, which were not previously utilized, but where the data remains very much identifiable. Google is calling this mega- results page Universal Search, which is a better term as far as definitions go, since Google is essentially universally searching all their database silos for all the results possible. Essentially, the search engines are now able to draw from more databases at one time and return results from all those queries to us on our results pages. The database sources used by search engines can now include blogs, books, catalogs, programming code, online directories, stock quotes, images, maps, news, video and standard web searches.

So on a so-called blended or universal results page, the searcher could see data from anyone of the above listed sources, organized by relevance, instead of just the page of links and snippets we are used to seeing now. In the past if we wanted to search specific data silo, we had to select Images, Maps, News, Shopping, etc, from the top of the search page, now all those silos can be automatically included.

I personally wonder how much this sort of mega results page will benefit us. My biggest complaint with search now is the shear volume of superfluous garbage we still seem to receive in our SERPs today, so I worry that unless the search algorithm gets drastically better, all these new search results possibilities could potentially just turn out to add to the useless noise and clutter plaguing us now. We shall see.

The most important question to us small business owners becomes, what does this mean to our sites, and how does it change the way we SEO? In short, for now it doesn’t change one thing. In two different sessions representatives of Google made it clear that good, proven SEO strategies are still as important as ever whether is be in web search or universal search pages, so we do not need to change what we are doing (assuming we are doing our SEO right). I think that is the best way to play it, just keep adding the rich content, building natural links, adding popular keywords, and our sites will continue to grow and do well. However, I am concerned with the prospect that we are now going to now need to compete with large companies and other media types for position on the SERPs. For example, if I am an online advertiser for my plumbing services, I don’t want the listing I worked hard to achieve to be replaced by some absurd YouTube plumbing mishap video, or by an image of Miss Plumber America, scantily clad holding a pipe wrench. I want my listing to rightfully stay put… I hope good SEO practices and a more defined and appropriate algorithm protect small business owners, our site’s position, and they continue to provide us with the opportunities to still do well online as Integrated Search becomes more mainstream. We will need to keep a close eye on it, and if we must, we will figure out how to make the new changes work best for us. I am sure Michael could make us some sort of another helpful tool. ?

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David Bailey, Google
(Photo Credit: Picasa)

(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

David Bailey, Google’s senior staff engineer, confirmed that the search giant is on the same broad path as always, giving the traditional "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" line.  One of his other statements was also a bit predictable: Google.com is supposed to remain the search box of first resort.

We found it comforting, however, that Google intends to keep things fast, simple, and relevant.  After recent murmurings about video ads, confirmation of those first two aspects may be especially important.

Looking forward, it appears that users will see more local business review snippets, more videos, more images (with explicit triggering on the long tail), grouped blogs, grouped books, more internationalization, and increasing diversity on the pages.

If not now, then in the future, Google’s universal search looks ready to live up to its name.

(click to enlarge)

You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.

Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.

From trying out Zvents’ new functionality, I think the overall concept is strong although it may require further refinement on the user-experience end. The dilemma for the site is that users who are requesting a particular type of content will want to be able to easily absorb the specific results they’re looking for. I did a search for “concerts” in San Francisco, and as a user I’d be less impressed when restaurants and venues are returned, if there aren’t concerts happening at them.

It’s true that a user looking for a concert or other event might also then be interested in restaurants in the immediate area or other cool things to see and do, but the perception of relevance for what the user requests must be very high, first and foremost. It may be that Zvents will need to rearrange their results listings in order to improve this perception — have precisely what’s requested be front and center while ancillary content be moved to sidebars or below the main listings. Blended results are dependent upon the context of the search in order to be perceived as relevant.

Still, much of search blending and local search results presentation is still in a very experimental stage throughout the industry, and Zvents’ moves are making them strong contenders for the long haul. Their plans to launch an open-source data storage and processing platform named Hypertable on January 31st, is starting to attract a lot of attention from the IT developer demographic. The system appears to be intended to provide Google-like powers to other people, since it’s a very similar concept to Google’s own BigTable, which is currently only used internally by Googlers. Hypertable will allow distributed processing and storage of both structured and unstructured data, apparently at excellent performance rates.

The introduction of the federated search / blended results may make Zvents’ content more attractive to developers who could use the Zvents API to increase their content’s distribution. Developments are well worth watching here.

[BTW - I’ll be speaking on the subject of Local Search & Blended Results at the upcoming SMX West conference in Santa Clara.]

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