Last Wednesday I trundled up to London at some ungodly hour (to avoid excessive commuter fares) on the train to the ExCel centre for the annual London A4Uexpo which is essentially a gathering of internet nerds people like me. I missed out on the full event deciding only to go for the day pass which I have to say was pretty worth while!
The talks were really good actually and I did pick up quite a bit of useful information, which I am happy to pass on here and now to you, for free!
The main theme of the talks I attended seem to be video and the upcoming trend of universal search results. Universal search results are essentially a Google results page that is littered with more than just web page links, including news results, image results and more importantly video results.
Are you aware of the 2nd busiest search engine on the web? Well apparently it is Google, well Youtube actually, so Google is number one and two!
So here are a couple of really useful tips that I gained from the day and will be implementing.
THINK UNIVERSAL!
As I mentioned above universal search results are here to stay and there has never been an easier time to get on the first page of results by using other channels. For instance optimise those images, make videos that are relevant to your niche and attempt to get into Google News (yes it can be done!)
VIDEO
This is the future people! Get videoing! Create that Youtube channel and upload those videos. A useful tip is to reply to other existing videos (popular ones) with your own video. Youtube video descriptions can take up to 5000 characters! Just think how many juicy keywords you can get in there.
One good example is a website about hotels. How cool to actually video the hotel, rooms and facilities and then to provide your site visitor with more of an experience than simply putting up a few links and photos? You get a much better feel for somewhere through video.
So here are three things that you should be looking at doing now..
1. Get your website in order
First of all, get your SEO in order, make sure you optimise your website and keep universal search in mind: optimise your images, get into Google News, make sure you are listed in Google Places and make sure you have video sitemaps in your website.
2. Combine offline and online
Make sure that if you do offline marketing to follow that up online.
3. Use all the channels such as video, facebook, twitter etc
Combine the different channels, both online and offline. Connect with your potential clients on Social Media (Twitter, Facebook or what ever social media your potential visitors are using. Make YouTube videos, post them and optimize them. Also start using others for your optimization efforts.
I hope that you find something useful in there. It was well worth the long day in the end.