Gaming the search engines has gotten a bit trickier in recent years, and it seems that, now more than ever, it’s important for online businesses and even the “regular”, or non-business based, website owners to differentiate their marketing approach in order to grab their fair share of the major search engine users. So, what’s this new twist that search engines have thrown into the game? It’s called blended search.

Blended search – multiple results from multiple resources

Yahoo does it, Ask does it – so does MSN and Google; instead of the plain-jane text based search results, more and more when you head to your favorite search engine, you’ll find that even your ordinary searches are pulling up some new features. For instance, when you head over to Ask and perform a search for Cancun, instead of only displaying the relevant website listings, you’ve got a mess halls worth of choices to pick and choose from; you can check out the current temperature in Cancun, a nice selection of related images, and even a blurb from Wikipedia.

While it’s fairly obvious from even a non-techie’s viewpoint that Ask, in general, offers the most variety in terms of blended search results, other search engines are right on track by offering a mixture of media resources when returning results from their respective engines.

You’re probably wondering how the temperature in Cancun has anything to do with grabbing your share of the internet search market for your own website, and it’s pretty simple. More and more, search engines are displaying images, news, video, local listings and relevant blog postings in their search results straight from their main pages.

What this means for you as a website owner is that in order to keep up with the times, you really need to make it a point to spread out your website marketing approaches. Certainly search optimization for your website is important, but if you continue to rely on the “old ways” of tweaking your page titles and obtaining incoming links, in the next couple of years your website will be eating the digital dust of your more savvy competitors.

Just as the seasons change, what works in regards to website content and optimization undoubtedly is changing as well. In the websites of yesteryear, text based websites with flashy designs were all the rave. Those days made way for the “all flash, all the time” websites, followed by the realization that flash really didn’t help too much in terms of optimization for search engines and we saw a subtle, but steady move away from the flash based websites of the 1990’s. Today, website owners are discovering that a nice mix of community based and media rich websites are the wave of the future, which happen to be growing in popularity each and every day.

So, how can you stay atop this trend and ride this wave of the new and improved WWW and benefit from the move of old-school search results to the blended results of today and tomorrow? It’s pretty simple; start differentiating your marketing approaches.

Instead of offering a boring blog, liven it up with the occasional video or audio commentary; instead of hiding your images from search engines, capitalize on the fact that images are being displayed in main-page search results by using descriptive, or keyword focused, image names; instead of relying on the old-school marketing approaches of buying links and swapping links to increase the popularity of your website, give people something worth talking about (because if you do, they certainly will). . . the list is nearly limitless.

The bottom line is this: websites are adapting to the new generation of internet users and search engines are adapting right alongside them; if you aren’t making an effort to cater to this new media-minded internet generation, in a couple of years’ time, your website will just be another ghost-town in our new digital world.