Universal search a.k.a Blended search is something that every person (who depends on internet for his daily and intellectual needs) experience every time he submits a query on his favorite search engine. The idea was first thrown in the year 2001 by Marissa Mayer, VP – Search Products & User Experience at Google who also wrote an article on the topic back in May 2007, when Google officially rolled out the concept on its search engine – Google.com. Today we see all major search engines have adopted this revolutionary approach to make search experience even richer, and yet simpler for the user who is looking for most relevant information on web in the least possible time.

But what exactly is Blended Search?

As the name suggests, Blended search is the process of blending or mixing content from multiple sources and displaying them together on one page. When the idea was launched around two and a half years ago, the main sources of the content were – news websites, videos, images, local and books which are still independent vertical search engines. But today, we have started seeing more results from social networks like facebook & twitter and press release website which are updated more frequently than any other online media.

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search. Click on image to expand

And how is it changing the SEO industry?

Earlier, website owners used to optimize their website with only focus on relevant content so that search engines can rank their websites on top of search results. It doesn't work the same these days now since search engines do not only rely on your website content. Instead, they have started looking for varied sources of information where they can find more relevant and updated content. News websites like CNN & Reuters; Social networking sites like Facebook & twitter; and Press release website like prweb.com etc are some of the sources that search engines rely heavily on for their content.

Please note that this doesn't mean you should stop optimizing your website content. On the contrary, you need to start updating your website content more frequently now since search engines love new, updated & relevant content. This is probably why many company blogs and press releases have become so popular these days.

But is it really changing the SEO industry?

Yes, it is. Because people have really started publishing their content on all the types of online media which has slight chance of being crawled by search engines and get ranked on first page. Here are the few examples -

1. Image results – All the search engines already have image search as an independent search engine which drives more than 10% of traffic for website owners. People have been focusing on optiming their images by using alt tags and more proper image names for quite some time now.
2. Videos & Slideshows- YouTube, owned by Google has the highest number of videos uploaded on the web. People have started publishing a video presentation of their company or products demo. They, then promote it on YouTube by writing comments, adding ratings and sharing with more people so that it gets enough popularity to get ranked on first page of search results. Then these videos or presentations are pushed on to other popular aggregator sites like Vimeo, Slideshare etc.
3. News Results – Press & news websites are the most hit upon source by website owners. There has been an evident surge in press releases published in last few years by website owners. The only reason being the importance given to such sites by Google.
4. Local business listings – Google, Bing and Yahoo show their respective maps to show local business listings. Hence, every website owner makes it a point that their business is submitted in local business listing directory. They strive hard to promote it by adding more ratings, comments and sharing with friends & existing clients.
5. Three blogs a week has become a reality. Website owners do not miss a single news however trivial it is, just to have something new up on their company blog. [Don't worry this post is not one of those ]
6. Social media marketing (SMM) – SEO Companies have started offering a new service called 'Social media marketing' wherein they promote their brand on social networking websites like – Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Myspace etc. They do it by submitting their brand name, linking it to their website, building network of friends and by commenting on other blogs.
7. Google Product search – Online shop owners are utilizing this feature to promote their products on increase sales from Google organic search result. Google offers merchants a separate place to submit their products individually with prices and description. Google then shows their products on top of search results for the relevant query.

Clearly, the focus on just your website's content is the thing of the past. In order to maximize your chances to be on the top of the search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you have to be on your toes all the time and exploit every source of data that major search engines scour today for their search results.

Google had recently implemented results from Twitter on it's search engine. The real-time updates or tweets provide users with relevant information from blogs and elsewhere posted on Twitter. Search engines such as Bing and Cuil also incorporate real-time search results for their users. Apparently Google had to alter it's page ranking algorithm to accommodate it's real-time results. So how does Google decide which tweets get priority over others?

Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, says that Google's algorithm aims to make out 'reputed followers' amongst Twitter users. Amit led the development on real-time search at Google. In an interview with MIT's Technology Review, Amit says;

"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers," his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widel. It is "definitely, definitely" more than a popularity contest"

However such tricks from reputed followers isn't the only part of Google's algorithm to rank tweets. Google seems to have ways to keep spam at bay while making out the relevant tweets from commonly used terms. Google also plans to make it's real-time results more relevant by adding geo-tagging data. That's something that could prove to be useful in the smartphones sector.

Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?
A: Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
A: Nope.

Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do?
A: I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while.

Recently Google has released a new algorithmic solution for better search experience so that you can directly jump to the information you want right from the search snippets. It’s good news for web searchers, because they can get directly to what they are looking for. But, what’s in it for SEO experts and web designers?

New Google Search Snippet Explained

From a searcher viewpoint, when you enter a page with long textual content in it, a kind of “table of content” with links to subtopical sections within the same page can make navigation extremely easy at that page. At the top of the page, you realize what that page consists of, click on it and get to the information you want to read.

From Google viewpoint, the new algorithm has recently made it possible for different named anchors of your page (subtopic sections) to individually rank at search engine result pages (SERP). So, now you may look for something in Google and see that the Google search snippet (the descriptive sentences, phrases, etc under the title and above the URL) shows part of a webpage as a subotpic with a slightly different URL at the same page.

Such results are indicated by the phrase Jump to.

An Example of How Google Search Snippet Works!

I provide you with a list of search queries that all link to one webpage, but different topical sections of it:

• usual clothing in Iran
• tipping in Iran
• quality of foodstuff in Iran
• kinds of drinks in Iran
• electricity voltage in Iran

I think this example could show you to the heart of how Google search snippet functions. Without wasting time, you can jump to what you are looking for. But, there’s a great lesson here for the web designers, SEO experts, online marketers, etc.

An Amazing Strategy to Increase Search Engine Visibility

Now that you know how Google search snippet takes people directly to particular sections of some webpages, here’s some SEO tips you can use to get benefits from this new algorithmic solution to increase search engine visibility:

1. Plan to write comprehensive long articles, posts, textual content for your site/blog.
2. Divide your content into several suptopics, headings, etc.
3. Create named anchors to identify sections on your page.
4. Write a descriptive phrase for each section.
5. Make sure you use your keywords at these name anchors.

Such strategy could be implemented at FAQ pages, Help pages, About Me Page, etc as well. You can use this strategy at any page with lots of information that could be categorized fall into subtopics.

Benefits of Dividing a Page into Several Sections

When you click on a link in such pages with named anchors, the URL of the page changes somewhat: the anchor text is added to the page URL. So, it is treated like a different page. So, your the page with such named anchors is seemingly divided into several other pages. When you include a keyphrase at each subtopic and write extensively about it under that subtopic, because it’s linked from the top of the page, an internal linking is also enhanced within the page. It will also include the keyword in it.

So, when you write about a general topic and divide it into several subtopic, each with a different keyphrase, the page is divided into several subpages that could help you increase search engine visibility for that page. What happens, at the end of the day, will be to get ranked for different subtopics of the same page. Consequently chances increase for that page to show up in the SERP due to the different sections individually ranking highly for their own keyphrases.

Eventually, you add to the search engine visibility of your pages by implementing such strategy.

If you are looking to promote your business online, you will get benefited from Social Bookmarking. This is a marketing tool which is far more productive than the other traditional methods of promoting. It is an important tool for any online business owner to know, master and take advantage of in order to succeed in their growing online business. Social Bookmarking is now one of the most recent trends online to help you in spreading your voice and presence across the Internet. It is basically a simple and easy yet very resourceful innovation. You would be having an option in which you could share your bookmarks with the wider Internet. Make your favorite websites and web pages available, with comment. This is a good way to promote your own business website to the millions of people that use these sites.

Social Bookmarking is a novel method of locating, storing and sharing files and data among online users, and also allows registered users to store their ‘favorite’ web-links. In most cases, the lists that are created by users of a specific bookmarking network may either be designated as public or private in nature. If the lists are public in nature, then other users would be able to locate and view the links. These lists can be searched randomly, by tags, popularity, or category, tags.

Advantages Of Social Bookmarking:

1. Social Bookmarking websites drive qualified traffic and would also increase your link popularity, because search engines “index” the pages within these sites, and will see the links to your website.
2. Social Bookmarking helps in quick indexing by the search engines.
3. The best way to drive instant traffic to your website. This is the only method which helps to boost the traffic of the website, making it easier to spread your online business’ Web content.

Sites I would recommend:

1. Delicious
2. Digg
3. StumbleUpon
4. Yahoo Buzz
5. Technorati
6. Kaboodle
7. Mixx
8. Propeller
9. Reddit
10. Newsvine

Tips of Successful Bookmarking:

1. Create Accounts in all the bookmarking sites which have good reputation in WWW.
2. Concentrate on building reputation by adding/communicating with other members.
3. Organize your tags well. Try and keep them simple. That makes it easier for the other users to find you.