SMX West Update – Day 1: Blended Search and Link Building Strategies

After a 3 hour time change that has me guessing what day it really is, delayed and re-routed flights, a frightening ride in an airport shuttle, and almost losing my luggage, it’s amazing how sunshine can brighten your day. That’s right… sunshine. Santa Clara California, the location of the Search Marketing Expo, is sunny and feels like spring time. Day 1 of SMX West has been enlightening in more than one way.

Day 1 was a full 12 hour day jam packed with exciting sessions about search marketing. I attended three sessions on blended search and one on link building strategies. Time flies when you’re having fun, or in this case, learning about search marketing! I just couldn’t wait to share some highlights of the day.

Blended search is a recent evolution in search where the engines are blending in video, images, blogs, news, local results, etc. into the search results pages. You may have heard us mention “Universal Search” or noticed that the results pages look a little different. If you’ve done a search in Google in the last year and have seen a thumbnail image of a YouTube video, that’s a blended result. If you searched for something with local intent (Cincinnati Roofers, for example) and noticed that there’s a map with 10 links to local business results next to it, that’s blended results. This concept is represented in all of the major engines, so it’s important that we take note and adjust our marketing efforts accordingly.

Since the top 10 results aren’t just links to your web pages any longer, we are faced with the challenge of how to optimize other forms of content so that your images, news items, blog posts, videos, etc. will show up in this new blend of results as well. We realize that not every site has a good reason to post a video, or that you might not want your images indexed. But for almost every site, there is an opportunity to further optimize and/or create other elements that could show up in the blended search results as well. The first three sessions of the day focused on blended search in general, optimizing video and images, as well as optimizing local listings to increase your changes of having those videos, images, or listings among the blended results.

And then there was link building. It’s no secret that quality links will help your rankings in the engines. And without quality links, it’s nearly impossible to get ranked well on optimization alone. This session offered several great new techniques and tips, and links to new tools that will help us further improve the quality of our link building program.

All that and there are still two more days. Can it get any more exciting? Stay tuned for more! The exhibit hall opens tomorrow (it probably is tomorrow already in Ohio) so I’ll be schmoozing with all the search engines to see how we can get them to boost your rankings… I promise.