Hi everyone! I attended a webinar on Tuesday May 11, 2010 and wanted to pass on some information about SEO and “Search 3.0″ – this webinar was by iProspect, Chris Sherman – Search Results SEO & the New World Order: Search 2010 – http://searchmarketingnow.com/search-results-seo-and-the-new-world-order-blended-search-2010-5492

Search 3.0 also known as Blended Search or Universal Search incorporates results from “non-web” info sources into “normal” web search results. For example, Google and Bing Universal Search currently scans web pages, news, videos, local, blogs, shopping, book search content in addition to live twitter feeds. In days of past, Search Engine Results brought up pure web pages only. Now when searching, you get the top 10 results PLUS, images, news feeds, real time feeds, local etc. There are so many more opportunities for our clients to come up in Search Results. Of course with that said, we need to optimize more than ever, from small details as saving image file names with keyword rich phrases, going one step further than even naming Alt Tags.

“In the next 5 years, video will become more popular than WebPages” stated Chris Sherman. Videos take more bandwidth and the way we build websites, layout and load times will continue to change and be important. Meta data in videos is huge, using lots of descriptive text on the page where the video is embedded. Another tactic, including URLs in the videos helps to encourage viral linking among views. Having the entire script of the video written out and added onto the page as a PDF or on the back end in the Meta description tag. I think a challenge will be getting our clients to hire a videographer and having them add video into their websites, but the ones that are ahead of the game with benefit.

Bing is very close to being the second most used Search Engine, Google being #1. With Bing and Yahoo merging, there are a few unknowns, and we’ll need to keep a close eye on both. Yahoo actually gets the most visits, due to their continued innovation with area’s they are good at – answers, business info, sports, health, entertainment, etc. Yahoo is seen as the “Media Destination”.

Images are also becoming more important than before, Google and Bing now use images as a part of their Search Results. Images should include a descriptive Alt Tag, file names should have keywords, and keyword rich text should be surrounding the picture (this means if there is a picture of a wine press, then the supporting copy should be talking about wine presses.) Images in Universal Search are more likely to appear in Searches for products, people or famous places.

The last point is that each page of your website should include location specific information, addresses, phone number (no more than 2 phone #’s), hours etc. There are many reasons to do this, more than you would think. Search engines, depending on which page is indexed, look for information like address and often times helps to display our clients in Google Places/Local Business, Skype highlights phone numbers so people can call them right from their computer, and it’s great usability for Searchers, etc.

I’d like to thank Chris Sherman from iProspect for one of the best webinar’s I’ve attended. I hope this info is useful; as it’s going to affect each of us in some way. This is a condensed version of what I learned but thought it was useful information to share. Contact us at www.gotrafficinteractive.com if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading,

Bill