Lead That Search Party!  According to an iProspect and JupiterResearch study released last year, search users prefer "blended" search results—in which results are potpourried with videos and other media—over standard (slightly boring) text-only search results.
Blended results (Google's term is "universal search") work like this: If you've got a restaurant, a search on your restaurant's name might turn up not only your Web site's URL, but also pictures that a vacationer took in your restaurant, a visitor's podcast, or a "best restaurants" news story. In other words, blended search is an awesome opportunity for differentiating yourself from the pack.
The study's finding "demonstrate[s] the need for search marketers to [search-]optimize their digital image, video, and news assets to maximize the chances of these assets being displayed when search engines return 'blended' search results," the authors write.
Fortunately, doing so just got a whole lot easier—at least for search results in Yahoo Search.
This month, Yahoo announced that sites can contribute to enhancing their own search results—be it with a flash video, a game, a presentation or spreadsheet. You don't need much programming knowledge, and there's no need to build your own application. Best of all, when users click on a video you post in your search results, it expands within the page—increasing the likelihood they'll spend more time with your content without having to leave Yahoo.
The program is made possible by SearchMonkey. Join the program at the SearchMonkey developer page; once you've chosen your media and inserted a few lines of code onto your site, enhanced listings for your search results will appear next time Yahoo's spiders crawl your content!
The Po!nt: Lead them on! Improve your engagement experience even before users step through the threshold: do it from search.
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