It’s becoming increasingly important, from a search engine optimization (SEO) stand-point, to create a wide variety of dynamic content on the web. An effective strategy used to be based solely on text-based results, but this is no longer the case. Although it is still important to create good quality, text-based content there are a variety of other platforms that can be utilized to help your organization rank well within the search engines.

Google has changed the name of the game (among many other search engines) and has started incorporating a variety of other platforms into search results. This allows for a more “blended” type of search. It is now estimated that roughly 1 in 4 Google search results incorporates this type of “blended” search result. This means it’s time to re-evaluate current SEO strategies and create not only quality text but additional video, images and news content.

Now that search results are moving on the direction of a “blended” approach there is less real estate within the first page of Google for text-based content. This means its time to start creating your YouTube and Flickr profiles, tagging these videos and images with a good quality title, description and set of keywords. These videos and images are also visually appealing with will increase the likelihood that individuals click on your link.

It’s important to create a wide variety of content (text, video and image based) on the web. How do we use this content to not only drive traffic to our site, but attract and establish credible leads/customers?  Adding links from the YouTube videos and Flickr images to your website, or to a useful blog post will definitely be beneficial. It’s really about connecting your audience to your brand/business through a variety of platforms and engaging these customers in a creative/useful way.