Universal Search

Looking back over the past few years, a significant change is the inclusion of maps, local business listings, videos, real time Twitter feeds, and more in regular search results (what Google calls Universal Search).

As we keep looking at the search results, they are constantly changing. This can be frustrating and cause a big headache for search engine optimization specialists and internet marketers, who make their living by providing top organic search results for clients.

To compete for listings in universal search results, you should have content in several categories, i.e. not just blog posts, but videos, info graphics, local news etc, where relevant.

Personalized search

The major search engines — Google, Yahoo, and Bing — are starting to provide personalized search depending on your IP address, browsing history, and any other information the search engines have gathered about you and your computer usage. This can seem invasive, but it is still in beta testing mode and might prove to be beneficial.

At the moment, though, personalization only changes a small percentage of the search engine listings. Although there are clear regional differences, a well optimized web page with good content has a good chance of ranking well in general.

One definitive way to help get your website showing higher in the personalized searches engine results is to fill out your business information in the Google Local Business Center (now Google Places), as this may help you rank well in geographical localized results. Filing out all the information in the LBC helps out a lot. The earlier you participate, the easier it seems to be to get that top spot as well.

Social media

Another big change is social media. Social media allows companies to interact with their customers, showing the face behind the company, so to speak. This can establish trust and if it is done right, it shows that you care about your customers.

There are so many social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, forums, article sharing sites, etc. that it can become quite overwhelming at times. However, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are at the top of their game when it comes to social media in 2010. If your company website is not actively on all of these sites, you could be falling behind. To get started, set up accounts and actively participate in these social media outlets to reap their full benefits.

Choosing the correct social media sites can be difficult. The way to go is to seek out those social media outlets that your customers are participating in and focus on those. If your customers constantly view forums, then you need to register for an account and frequently post and comment in threads. If they use Twitter, then you need to follow them and have them follow you.

You could also post news, special deals or coupons, to entice your customers to click through to your web site and buy your products. But remember that the most important thing you could be doing on the social web is listening to your customers, responding to their questions and being a serious dialogue partner for them.

Social site slike Facebook and twitter may not generate a large number of direct inbound links. People using twitter often uses URL shorteners when linking to a site, and I doubt that has an effect on your rankings. Facebook pages cannot be spidered by Google and the search engines. But the buzz that is generated may entice bloggers and others to link to your site. So in addition to the traffic that is generated by the tweets and Facebook entries directly, you may also gain a long term search engine optimization effect by being active online.

Stay tuned to Google

Google is the largest of the search engines and dominates much of the web industry. What they do or say often become web standards. What this means for internet marketers, is that you have to stay up-to-date with Google’s changes to the search engine rankings and how they impact your website. You must change your approach and adapt to succeed in the future of the web and SEO.

Google does have many beta products that are being released and tested as we speak that can revolutionize the search game. Make sure to stay updated on all the current programs being tested and released by Google so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Bing is the major competitor of Google, especially now that Bing’s index will feed into Yahoos search results. It therefore make sense to spend some time on the development of Bing as well.