Visibility in universal search

I attended an interesting presentation on ‘The next step for search’, from a search marketing perspective at internetworld.

Andrew Girdwood and others talked about brand and trade names, social graph driven search and more, but what interested me most was the challenges and opportunities with universal/blended search, where the major search engines are increasingly displaying other content formats – maps, images and especially video within the main search engine results.

So there is a challenge and, of course, an opportunity to get relevant videos etc. displayed in the main SERPs in addition to the regular text link. Perceived wisdom was that its relatively easy to rank well with video for relevant terms and, of course, Google loves YouTube.