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.

What this means to website owners and the marketing tactics they use

Really, this should be seen as an exciting advancement for internet business owners; instead of merely relying on their website’s pages to obtain traffic from search engines, they can start to utilize images, video, and the “buzz factor” to grab even more traffic from these major engines offering blended search results. In today’s WWW, media is where it’s at anyway; with the widespread availability of affordable broadband internet, more and more internet users today are enjoying the fact that they can watch streaming video and listen to audio broadcasts online. As search engines continue to deepen their blended search results into other areas, website owners are getting new venues to attract more people to their websites; something that smart website owners are already capitalizing on.

How can a website owner start taking advantage of the new blended search format?

It’s simple; vary your marketing methods. Instead of relying on tweaking your website’s page titles, keyword density and building inbound links as your sole optimization and marketing approach, start using video, audio and images with keyword focused names. Youtube and Revver are excellent resources for website owners, not only do they allow you to upload videos so that you can display them on your own website with little technical know-how, they both have a large user base where you can receive nearly instant-exposure to your videos; plus, the search engine exposure doesn’t hurt, either. Recordpad is a free audio recording tool for Mac’s and PC’s that allows you to create Mp3 files, which would be more than suitable for an audio podcast on your website. A simple digital camera or royalty free image websites can give you the types of images that you need to take advantage of blended search results; the tools are out there, you just need to take the initiative to start varying your website marketing methods so that you, too, can capitalize on these new features that the major search engines are offering.

The search engine marketing game is changing. If you want your website to thrive in this new digital world with this generation of media minded internet users, you’ve got to stay atop the trends and utilize the new tools of the trade. But hey, if you want to take your chances by relying on the old ways of marketing, optimizing and promoting your website, that just leaves more room at the top for the rest of us.