Posts About ‘universal search’

Universal Search: how often are they shown on Google’s SERPs?

Last week Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reported on a study done by Searchmetrics about which types of universal search – results from specific vertical searches such as videos and images, shown in addition to normal web page results – appear most often in Google’s American SERPs.

Now Searchmetrics has sent State of Search similar data for UK search results, and it appears the trends follows that of Google.com closely. First of all, what jumps out is that universal results are a part of the vast majority of SERPs. Less than 30% of Google’s results pages do not have a universal element to them. (more…)

Google News in Universal SERPs

Somehow I’ve managed to get the ‘Google News expert’ badge by virtue of my experience with the Belfast Telegraph. In all honesty I don’t feel like a Google News expert by any stretch. I suppose it’s a case of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. There are some truly great newspaper SEO people around like Brent Payne (Tribune, he was on our radioshow a few weeks back), Chris Moran (Guardian), and Julian Sambles (Telegraph) – compared to them I feel like quite the amateur.

But people seem to appreciate my sharing of what I learn about Google News at the Belfast Telegraph. So much so that I was asked to present about Google News on the Manchester SEO mini-conference last week. (Which was a great wee conference by the way, I had jolly good fun and met a great many wonderful people, including State of Search’s own Pete Young, Nichola Stott, and Kelvin Newman.)

One of the main points of my presentation was how simplistic the Google News ranking algorithm is when it comes to including news results on universal SERPs. I want to highlight that particular aspect of Google News a bit more in this blog post. (more…)

Social Marketing: From Offline to Universal (#a4uexpo presentation)

At

  • Social Marketing: From Offline to Universal (#a4uexpo presentation)
  • 6 killer presentations from #a4uexpo: Advanced Analytics, Information Architecture, Negative SEO & more
  • Launching an Affiliate Business on a ShoeString – A4U Expo London 2010
  • Microformat and Datafeed Optimisation – A4U Expo London 2010
  • Using Your Competitor’s Tactics to Gain a Competitive Edge – A4UExpo London 2010
    • I got to talk for no less than an hour on a topic which lies really close to me. Since a few months I am the “social marketing ambassador” (yes the jokes on the term ‘ambassador’ are many : -) ) and I am ‘hooked’ to search since many years now. In my view we will see a more integrated way of searching in the future. The different channels will be combined which means we will have to target our audiences differently. With “social” getting into our world rapidly we will need a different approach. And thats the approach I discussed last week in London.

    You can find the presentation below, but I thought I’d put my talks in writing and let you in on the world I think we are going to see in the near future. (more…)

    State of Search radioshow – episode 16: Optimizing for Universal Search with Tom Critchlow

    Roy returned this week and talked about some of his iPhone issues. Bas and Roy were also joined by Tom Critchlow, a UK SEO, with a speciality in optimizing for Universal Search. Tom is the head of SEO at Distilled in the UK and a well known speaker at international conferences. Tom, sometimes mistaken for his brother Will, talked about how to optimize the Universal Search elements Local, Video and images. A very informative show.

    The shownotes are below, all the links can also be found in the special delicious feed. (more…)

    Find out which universal results Google shows for all of your important search querys

    Google is showing more and more universal results blended in the regular search results for different queries. For the search queries we’re targeting I wanted to try and map which kinds of results Google shows. I started doing it by hand but soon realized it was going to take me lot of time for one client, let alone for all our clients. So I started looking for a piece of software that could help me out. Roy Huiskes adviced me to use Mozenda. Mozenda is best described as a piece of software to gather data from the web, based on a defined track of actions. I tried solving my issue and succeeded! Here´s how to do it yourself in 10 easy steps: (more…)