In today’s keynote speech, Danny Sullivan reminded us his prediction from December of 2003 of “invisible tabs” on the search pages, where vertical search results will be considered highly relevant and included in the search results.

I am currently attending “Local Search & Blended Results” sessions of SMX West. Local search results are being blended into web search results. This changes the desired “number one position” rules on the search engine results page (SERP).

So, what does it mean to be number one on the search result page? It is not just a web page of your site only anymore. Click on the image in this post to see that the number one position of the organic results is not even showing up in the first page on my screen. It is right below the fold. Sponsored ads and the local business results with a map occupy the entire screen.

It is a blending of all your digital properties, like: news, images, video, blogs, music, shopping, products, cars, etc… If you want to optimize the traffic from the search engines you need to start incorporating optimization techniques for all, or some of these “vertical search” categories. For latest tips on optimizing images and video see a post from the previous session written by SEO Roundtable.

A great capture of more details from this sessions is done by Barry on his post.

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