by Jonathan Marshall I read a very interesting blog this morning about the next steps in Search and where it's going in the next couple of years? Furthermore, what do marketers, especially those in SEO have to take in to account when planning for the future of search marketing campaigns? The blog by Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ goes on to list some of the predictions regarding the future of search, both in the short and long-term.

And here it is: More Universal ComScore research shows that universal (or blended) search results are increasingly dominating SERPs. In early 2008, 17 percent of searches returned some type of blended result. By the end of last year, that figure had climbed to 31 percent of all search results, and it continues to rise. This is true across all the engines, and Microsoft's launch of Bing confirms there's no end in sight. More blended results — the appearance on the page of video, book, news, local, and you-name-it results — means stiffer competition for valuable SERP real estate. All those headers, thumbnails, and images take up space on the page, allowing for fewer results to appear in the top results returned by the engines.

SEO Gets More Complicated You'll have to optimize pretty much everything: video, images, books, news, and more. Carefully selected keywords in Web page copy just won't cut it as an SEO strategy for long. Metadata around images, audio and video transcripts, and carefully crafted headlines in news releases and stories are already important but will soon become vital tools in the SEO arsenal.  San Diego SEO training seminars preach that SEO is getting more complicated by the day.  You'll be competing not only for that valuable real estate but also for the right users. As search algorithms become more sophisticated, blended results will take the searcher into account. They'll be based, at least in part, by geolocation, time of day, search history, and social affinities. It won't be just about appearing in search results but also about appearing to the right searcher, at the right place, at the right time, and with the right media.

Search Will Go Social Increasingly, it will become harder to optimize based on keywords alone. Context and searcher intent will shape the results individual searchers are returned on their queries. Search engines already take behavioral data and individual search history into account when returning results. Watch for them to rely on social and network affinities as well. The groups, tribes, and organizations individuals gravitate to speak volumes about the direction of their intentions. While introducing social elements into search adds another not-to-be-sneezed-at layer of complexity on things, it will also make search even more valuable as a feedback mechanism than it already is.