I saw an article yesterday on Google's universal search and vertical search properties. I was wondering what everyone's thoughts were on optimizing for vertical search (defined as video, news, blogs and images)?

Here's the article: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-977...=2547-1_3-0-20

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Reed Botwright
IDX Coordinator
Real Estate Webmasters Staff
MLS Update Blog

Universal Search is something we should all be doing right now, IMHO. Using page and file names to optimize as well as alt tags and similar things is likely going to be rather important in the future. I get traffic from some of my optimized images.

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Eric Rogers - REALTOR
Century 21 Pro-Team
Aurora IL Real Estate | Batavia Real Estate
Yorkville Real Estate

I think sites that sell a large inventory of products can generate good traffic just by having images come up under searches for specific model names, etc. For real estate I'm not sure exactly how it would work. We have thousands of pictures of "houses". Maybe the alt tags can be automatically generated on IDX listings that use some of the MLS fields or description? Maybe "city name home, 3 bedroom 2 bath, asking price" or something like that? or "waterfront home in Austin" for IDX listings that are listed as waterfront in the MLS? It could be interesting to experiment with this as they roll out universal search.

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Jim Olenbush, ABR, CRS, GRI
Broker / Realtor

Austin Real Estate

This is a new concept for me. Reed, thanks for pointing out the article.

I have seen agents' videos of listings on Youtube as well as agents' neighborhood videos that are framed into their websites (while on YouTube or other video sites). It would be interesting to know the SEO effect.