Google appears to be increasingly embracing the universal search platform. As competition from Yahoo and Microsoft’s all-new Bing.com heats up, Google must now address the quality of its core product and the overall search experience.

Universal search blends a variety of content with search results. This might include news, images, video content, blog posts, and even books in addition to traditional website listings. While most search engines are adding content variety to their results pages, the biggest challenge is in providing the content in an easy to understand manner. The other challenge is determining how relevant a piece of content is in relation to a specific search query. For a given query, would a blog post be most relevant or perhaps a video? Regardless, the information found within the SERPs is becoming more varied than ever before, and the trend can be seen in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

With the rapid implementation of universal search, there are certainly more opportunities for website owners. When devising content for the Web, it’s increasingly important to consider types of content and think about where to place this content. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can develop your digital assets to take full advantage of universal search.

News

Search engines love fresh content in general, but all search engines these days are also becoming hubs for news-related content. Luckily, any dealership can take advantage by creating news releases about new products, unique sales promotions, special events, or philanthropic work in the community. This content can easily find its way into Google News and become featured as ‘News’ within search results pages for important search queries. Popular websites for submitting press releases include PR Newswire and PR Leap, both of which provide a variety of options to maximize reach and SEO capabilities.

Video

Video is one of the most powerful types of content available, yet many dealers neglect to utilize this medium online. Not only is it easy for car dealers to take television commercials and post them online, but creating an online video that explores new models or provides some type of tutorial can greatly improve the online user experience. Video content can be posted on numerous websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and even Flickr, to expand potential viewership. Best of all, videos from popular websites like YouTube not only can find their way into search results, but they can also be optimized for specific keywords and phrases.

Images

Many users turn to search engines to find images, especially new car shoppers looking for quality pictures of new models. By paying particularly close attention to files names, fie size, and most importantly SEO-friendly alt tags and text captions, the images on your website will have a greater chance of attracting more views. To prepare your images for universal search, check out the image search tool in Google’s Webmaster Central.

Local Listings

Local listings are truly the low-hanging fruit of universal search. While it’s easy to forget adding your dealership to local listings on various search engines, it could make a huge impact. By taking just a few minutes to update your local listing information, your dealership’s location and contact information can appear within the SERPs, in addition to standard organic listings. To confirm if you have been added to local listings, check out GetListed.org for more information.

Product Listings

Product listings can be a unique way to generate extra revenue for any parts and accessories department. For long-tail, specific product searches, search engines such as Google are commonly showing specific product listings in search results. By jumping into product listings, dealerships can take advantage of other outlets beyond eBay and other popular e-commerce options.

Blogs

We’ve certainly discussed the importance of blogging on Top Dealer SEO before as there are ample advantages to it when it comes to SEO and building awareness. Blogs also make it easy to add fresh content to your website and they help attract links from other websites. In addition to building buzz within the blogosphere, blogs can also ping Google Blog Search and other blog search platforms which automatically notifies these services of updates.

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Read the about the latest internet marketing trends for car dealers right here.

As one of the first presentations of the day, following a rather dry introduction to the SES San Jose Conference by Kevin Ryan, the Universal & Blended Search presentation seemed appropriate as it has been in full swing since 2007 and continues to be large component of how the top tier search engines deliver content to its users.

Universal Search was a dramatic shift away from the traditional, and now archaic, 10 blue link search result pages, to a far more relevant and dynamic SERP that includes not only direct links to websites, but also links to other forms of content such as news, images, and video.

The panel from this track included product managers from Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, Ask, and Cool Iris.

The importance of Universal Search is that it gives marketers, including car dealers, a greater opportunity to own more the of SERP. Take Honda Texarkana for example. Search queries that this dealer ranks well for include Louisiana Honda Dealers, which includes not only the link to the dealer’s website, but also video content from YouTube that’s displayed prominently on the first page. As this dealer is able to own more of the first page for a given keyword with various forms of content, there’s less space for their competitors.

Not only are books, images, news, and video already a large component of Universal Search, but according to Google’s Johanna Wright, new verticals including blogs and shopping will also be increasingly prominent in the SERPs.

Another important component of Universal Search that’s especially crucial to auto dealer websites is the incorporation of local data. Performing a search for Chevrolet San Diego for example will not only deliver a list of websites relevant to the search query, but it will also deliver local content including local dealers displayed within Google Maps at the top of the listings.

Delivering relevant, quality content to the end user is always the top priority for the search engines, and this will only fuel further experimentation and expansion of Universal Search. With millions of users turning to Google and other search engines each day to find content, it’s ridiculous to assume that these users aren’t looking for images, blogs, news, products, videos, and other forms of rich content aside from traditional website links. As such, the time for car dealers to expand into video and other vehicles of online communication is certainly now.

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More SES San Jose 2008 coverage coming this week!