For all its public travails, nobody can accuse Yahoo!’s developers from slacking off. We were quite excited to see del.icio.us results being integrated into SERPs a couple of months ago, and are very excited to learn about SearchMonkey.

Effectively, SearchMonkey allows developers and webmasters to affect how their sites appear in SERPs. Of course, this has always been possible through meta description tags, but Yahoo! are now pushing this to the next level.

SearchMonkey allows you to make incredibly visual listings, as illustrated above.

The potential of this is huge for driving qualified traffic – the goal of most SEO work. Would you be more likely to click on a plain, old textual entry, or a visual one with more information?

As a site owner, you have to provide Yahoo! with structured data to create these listings, according to the guidelines laid out here. Once you structure the information as Yahoo! want to see it, you can include user reviews, addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos and smarter page summaries in your listing.

With this and del.icio.us intergration, Yahoo! are giving us a glimpse into their vision of search in the coming years. It will be very interesting to see Google’s response – while they still hold a 90% market share in the UK and much of Europe, advances like this could well threaten the hegemony in the medium to long term. Yahoo!’s market share in the States is still much higher than in Europe – around 20% in April 2008.

Search Engine Optimisation is more than just getting top positions – it is making sure that this visibility converts into visits and sales. We are keeping a close eye on this cheeky SearchMonkey.