We’re always looking for new ways to climb to the top of that SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ladder. In any competitive market, there can be literally millions of websites, so it’s not easy. However, you need to be aware that in the new era of Universal Search, there’s a shortcut, a way to leapfrog all those other sites and get you near the top where you belong.

The key is the way today’s search engines compile results. It used to be that each category of search (web, images, news, blogs, etc.) was its own separate deal. If you searched the web engine, you got web results. If you searched the image engine, you got image results, etc. Those separate engines still exist, but your main search page queries search according to a universal search protocol, which means they compile results from all these engines.

Here’s the trick: Search engines tend to determine the value of a result based on how it does relative to other results on the same engine, not relative to all the results. This means that an image that has more juice than 1000 images can find its way to a universal search page ahead of a hundred thousand or more results! The implications should already have your mind racing. Instead of trying to climb a mountain, take the elevator to the top of the adjacent building and cross the bridge over to the mountaintop.

Your first instinct is probably to start thinking about ways to optimize key images on your web pages, and that’s a good impulse. But if you’re selling a product, you should be aware that there are product (or shopping, or marketplace, whatever you want to call it) search engines too. Blow away the other product results, and you can slide in to the top ten of any basic search for your product’s keywords. Best of all, while almost every company has a website, nowhere near every company is taking advantage of product feeds.

Setting up a product feed for your company is time-consuming, but not difficult. First, you’ll want to put all your products into an Excel Spreadsheet. Then, head on over to Google Product Search and follow the instructions to submit your product feed to Google. The tricky part is not setting up the product feed, but optimizing it.

The reason why to optimize your product feed should now be obvious. The way to optimize it should be fairly obvious too. Simply give your product catalog the SEO treatment. Make a note of all your category titles and use your preferred keyword analytic software to find the most searched terms (as well as frequently searched terms that are rarely used by your competitors) for your product categories. Go back to your Excel sheet and rename all your categories with the appropriate keywords. Then check out each product and make sure the product name and descriptions are stuffed with the keywords and keyword phrases that people who want what you are selling search with. Don’t cram so many in there that your product description becomes unwieldy, just make sure the top keywords are there so you will make it to the top of the product search engine and thereby, to the top of the universal search engine. This may take some time, but oh boy, will it be worth it.