Effectively marketing your website for better exposure to search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM), has certainly changed over the years. From the days when keyword focused Meta tags were the de-facto method to grab top rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to the recent days, and today still, when most major engines weigh the value of incoming links more heavily than any on page factors in their ranking algorithms; there’s been big changes in the methods used by website owners to take hold of their fair share of visitors from the major search engines. Today, there’s a new twist being thrown into the search engine marketing game, and that’s come about with the new concept of blended search results.

Blended search - mixing multiple media types with natural listings

It doesn’t really matter which major search engine you’ve decided to use as your portal to the World Wide Web; Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, they all have something in common. Something besides the obvious, that is. These major search engines, who grab nearly 100% of the daily search engine user base worldwide, are all starting to offer their own forms of blended search results. Instead of the plain-old text based website listings that used to be displayed when performing a search, users are seeing related images, blog posts, links to news stories, related videos and a whole slew of other topically related media attached to these searches. (more…)