Rank your images and video in universal search

You don’t have to go far to find digital marketers wringing their hands over the growing invasion of Google’s universal features into the SERPs.

And can you blame them? In the search results for the query "rainbow" (shown below), there is a single standard organic result above the fold.

It’s a good idea to step back and remember that even though these results aren’t the traditional ten blue links, they’re still natural results.

In other words, they’re earned media; they represent what Google thinks will be the most high quality and relevant result for a query. That means there’s a huge opportunities for digital marketers who have quality content and optimization skills.

I optimized my last post on Econsultancy for the term "offline marketing". After it was published, I noticed that it appeared in the news universal search feature for the query.

Universal search works in my favor here. The format of the news element makes the article a prominent visual feature on a competitive first page.

I optimized this post using SEO best practices, not specifically targeting universal search. This goes to show that despite the fact that universal search elements have different algorithms and ranking triggers, the best practices of both types of search results are similar and their strategies are complimentary.

Offensive and defensive universal search strategies

Universal search is another opportunity to get your brand out there in a competitive market. In every vertical, there are untapped niches and those who are the first to market will have an enormous advantage.

While you can find these opportunities and offensively maneuver for universal search space, you may also want to strategize defensively.

After all, it’s important to know where you rank organically in the context of universal search.

If you’re Tilly’s in the above SERP, you technically only rank one organic position below Nordstrom. However, the images universal result that Google surfaces in the middle dramatically widens the space between these two results.

It’s helpful to know that for this SERP, putting in the elbow grease it takes to jump up one natural ranking position will pay off extra.

You’ll leapfrog over the universal result in addition to the Nordstrom organic result. Knowledge like this can really help you prioritize your optimization efforts.

How to rank for videos in universal search

Realistically, we can’t look at all the possible ways to rank for universal results in a single blog post (one look at Dr. Pete’s 'mega serp' will cure you of that desire).

Still, we’ll take a look at videos (and images) to help give you a sense of the tactics.

If you sell products online, you’ll probably want to start producing video content. After all, a whopping 96% of consumers find video useful in their purchase decisions.

Fortunately for marketers who want to rank for video content, there’s literally a guidebook. The YouTube playbook showcases best practices to help you surface video content in both the natural results and in the universal search results.

A video in the universal search results can be quite powerful. In the SERP for the query "Adidas Mens F30", Sports Authority actually outranks Amazon because of the video’s position as a universal search element.

Not only does Sports Authority outrank Amazon, its video result also pops visually, attracting eyes with its ratings and preview.

One of the primary ways Sports Authority does this is by producing extremely detailed, high quality structured data to accompany its videos.

As a brief refresher on structured data: search engines recommend that you use rule-based html tags that convey meaning about your site content.

For that reason, good structured data often helps you rank better for more relevant queries. (If you need more info, start with this post by Andrew Isidoro.)

This is Sports Authority’s video sitemap. It is an excellent example of detailed, well-constructed markup.

The markup tells search engines all kinds of details about its video. Here is just some of the info contained here:

Whether the video is family friendly.
How long it is.
View count.
Publication date.

All this goes a long ways towards getting Sports Authority’s videos in the valuable universal search real estate. Anecdotally, we’ve seen schema vastly improve video rankings in both natural and universal search.

How to rank for images in universal search

More than ever, Google is doing an excellent job of identifying when images are unique. Unique images have a far better chance of appearing in universal search positions (and ranking well in general).

Zappos performs very well in the universal image packs because of its emphasis on unique content. Zappos takes pictures of all of its products (and shoots its own videos).

You can see that the site is being rewarded for both those efforts in this SERP for "dr marten 1460".

Besides uniqueness, it’s also critical to optimize the title, alt tag, and the copy around your images with relevant keywords on relevant pages.

As Google itself warns, “…if you have a picture of a polar bear on a page about home grown tomatoes, you’ll be sending a confused message…” As always, authority also plays a part.

Universal search is the best thing since sliced bread

There's an interesting study by iCrossing about the myriad benefits brands gain by appearing in both natural and paid search. I think it's fair to extrapolate that appearing in natural, paid, and universal search can only heighten those effects (more visits, conversions, and so on).

Add the fact that universal elements are often at the top of the SERP and are visually appealing...that's rich territory you can't afford to ignore.

Ranking in universal search isn't out of reach, either. A good SEO strategy goes a long way towards universal search optimization. Alongside best practices, factor in the ranking triggers for universal search (like schema for videos and uniqueness for images). Be aware of where universal elements do and do not appear in the search results.

With good SERP data and a solid SEO strategy, universal search can help marketers improve just about every metric they care about.

Universal Search presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Thumbnails of images, videos, places, and news in search results attract the most attention from users. Ranking for this content drives greater conversions while also grabbing market share from competition, since real estate on the first page of search results is limited.

Marketers face challenges when trying to optimize SEO for universal search across multiple types of content, in addition to text. They also have limited visibility into keyword performance for the different types of content, for their own companies as well as competitors’.

BrightEdge S3 helps marketers outrank competition and drive greater conversions by optimizing their sites for images, video, places, and news, while also understanding their true rank with Blended Rank.

Blended Rank

Search engines are constantly refining their algorithms, and adjusting SERPs. On desktop search, 7 results are starting to appear on Google page one (instead of the usual 10). As Google makes changes, organizations need SEO technology with Big Data processing power capable of analyzing this massive data stream.

Google Universal Search: 3 Steps You Should Take To Stand Out From The Crowd

Aura Dozescu - 8 Comments

Does anyone see the little red guy upfront?

It’s right there, in our face! Yet nothing sets it apart from all the other little red guys in the picture.

Let’s imagine now that this is a search engine results list and each golf tee represents an entry. Even if it’s not on the first position, I bet all eyes are on the white tee.

That’s the magic of Google Universal Search, where traditional organic results are blended with specialized search entries like Videos or Images, making the SERPs look cheerful like a sunny day.

This system gives you the chance to gain more visibility in the search engine by exploring different types of content. To stand out from the crowd, like our white golf tee here, you need to focus on three main steps:

1. Choose the result types you will target
2. Optimize the fresh content you create
3. Monitor your Universal Search rankings

Choose the result types you will target

A Searchmetrics study performed in 2011 shows that most of the results returned as Universal entries come from the Videos and Images specialized searches.

These are also the result types proven to have the strongest visual impact on the searchers. Since people are more likely to click on a video or image thumbnail than on an URL, you can definitely boost your clickthrough rate by creating video presentations and tutorials for your products and services, and use ingenious images on your web pages.

But other types of results should not be neglected, especially if they match your business profile. For example, if you are selling golf tees, it’s a good idea to also target the Shopping search results.

Just think about the different content and media aspects that you can approach. Here is a list with all the Universal result types (that I know of) Google includes in the SERPs:

Note: the link on each result type above takes you to a Universal Search example in Google.com.

Optimize the fresh content you create

Creating the new, diverse content gets only half the job done. The next step is to prepare it for the search engines.

Universal Search optimization factors are similar to those used when optimizing content for web search.

Your techniques should include:

Here is one of Matt Cutts’ videos explaining how traditional optimization factors affect Universal video results:

Once you have the new optimized content ready, it’s time to publish and promote it on various channels like blogs, social media and video sharing platforms. This should help you make the new content accessible to a larger audience.

Monitor your Universal Search rankings

Now that you’ve seen where to focus your optimization efforts, it’s time to take a look at the results.

Below, I will show you how you can track Google Universal Search ranking results with Advanced Web Ranking. Let’s take as an example the keyword “golf tee” and the Google Canada search engine.

A quick search in browser reveals an Image result on the third position.

Here are the steps you should follow in order to track this Image result:

Select your Google Universal search engine

You can do this from Project -> Search Engines. Just click on the [Add] button and choose the first option available – [Add Search Engines]. Here, type Google Universal in the filter box and the search engine will pop up in the list.

To target a particular country, you need to click on [See more countries], and then select the related search engine (in this case Google Canada).

Now just click [OK] and the search engine will be automatically added to your AWR project.

Choose the results type you want to display

To track only specific universal results, you need to right-click on the search engine you just added in the project, and select [Properties]. All the Universal results available for tracking in the application are listed in the [Result Types] grid, as below:

To monitor only part of them, un-check the options that you don’t need. When you’re done, just click [OK] and your preferences will be stored in the application.

Start the rank tracking process

To do this, click on the green [Update] button, from the left-bottom corner of the application window.

If you want the rankings update to run automatically, you have the option to create a scheduled task in AWR. This should gather the ranking data at a frequency of your own choice.

See results in rankings report

When the update is completed, you can see the Google Universal ranking results in one of the AWR reports. For example, let’s choose Rankings -> Website Rankings and select the [Date Comparison] view.

To display the Result Type column, click on the [Select Columns] button, next to the [Website] column, and check the related check box.

Here is our Image result, on the 3rd position in Google Canada:

This way, you can easily keep an eye on the new videos, images or other type of content you promote.

Conclusion

Changing the way SERPs look today, and subsequently the behavior of the searchers, Google transformed content diversity from “nice to have” into a “must have”.

So dare to explore new challenges in your search engine optimization strategy and make your fresh content accessible on as many marketing channels as you can.

I’m sure there is a lot more to tell about Google Universal Search and how to make the most of each specialized search type. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photo credit: Steven Depolo

A three-fold increase in Microsoft Windows computers infected with malicious software in late 2013 came from an application that was for some time classified as harmless by security companies.

The finding comes as part of Microsoft’s latest biannual Security Intelligence Report (SIR), released on Wednesday, which studies security issues encountered by more than 800 million computers using its security tools.

In the third quarter of 2013, an average of 5.8 Windows computers out of every 1,000 were infected with malware, said Tim Rains, director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing division, which tracks security trends targeting the company’s widely used products. That jumped to about 17 computers per 1,000 for the last quarter of the year.

Rains attributed the rise to malware called “Rotbrow.” The program masquerades as a browser add-on called “Browser Protector” and is supposedly a security product, Rains said by phone Wednesday. Rotbrow was found on about 59 of every 1,000 computers using its security products, he said.

For some time, computer security companies didn’t classify Rotbrow as malicious software. Rotbrow is known as a “dropper,” with capabilities to download other software on a computer. It didn’t initially download malware to computers it was installed on, Rains said.

But then Rotbrow started downloading malicious browser extensions. Microsoft noticed the change and alerted other security companies, which then began blocking it.

The tactic, which had been used by fake antivirus programs in the past, meant that Rotbrow was already installed on a huge number of computers.

“I would characterize it as a low and slow attack,” Rains said. “They were patient and waited a long time before they started to distribute malicious stuff. I think they gained a lot of people’s trust over time.”

Rotbrow often distributes Sefnit, a type of malicious botnet code, which can subsequently download other harmful programs to a computer such as those involved in click fraud. Sefnit has also been linked to “ransomware,” which is malware that encrypts a person’s files and demands payment.

Microsoft added detection for Rotbrow in its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) last December after it raised suspicion.

Safer overall

Overall, Microsoft’s latest report concluded that security improvements in Windows such as ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention) have made it much more difficult to exploit known vulnerabilities. The report also said the number of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products that can be remotely exploited has fallen by 70 percent between 2010 and 2013.

“We are really trying to raise the cost of exploitation,” Rains said. “It’s not impossible to exploit, just hard. They have to put in the extra time, extra cost.

As a result, attackers are increasingly trying to just trick people into downloading their malware by bundling it with legitimate programs or music, he said.

The latest report does not include data on the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer that Microsoft released an emergency patch for on Monday. The flaw, which affects IE 6 through IE 11, could allow attackers to execute code remotely on a compromised computer if the user views an infected webpage using the browser.

Rains said “time will tell” if its next report shows a rise in infections due to the bug. But Microsoft believes the quick release of a patch and fact users have to be lured to a malicious website mitigates the risk.

“I don’t think we will see an uptick [in infections] given the quick response and the type of vulnerability that is,” Rains said.

technoartinfo

vendredi 9 mai 2014