2011 London SES Conference Summary

Back in the office this morning after an excellent couple of days at the London SES Conference. Met some great people and watched a number of highly insightful presentations from the industry’s leading experts in Search Engine Marketing.

Big topic this year was Social Media with a number of presentations focusing on the various different aspects including Twitter, Facebook and utilising SEO and Social as a combined package.

The stand out presentations for me over the two days were:

Update on Real Time Search: I Want it Now!
Aaron Kahlow, Paddy Moogan and Dave Coplin gave a great talk on how real time search is developing and how marketers can jump on the back of this new stream of instant information.

Some of the take away tips include:

• To get tweet images shown in the real time search results, you should tweet the image before including it in the post that you want to actually promote it in
• Place a 301 redirect on the image file, directing it to your site away from the standard image hosting platforms to keep your users on your site
• Get into Google News by:
  • Using multiple authors
  • Utilising a news sitemap
  • Adding a number to the URL
  • Keep asking Google for inclusion

Video Search Optimisation
Another great three speaker session with Paul Carff, Will Critchlow and Jonathan Allen on what we should be doing to get our videos optimised and distributed across the web.

Some of the take away tips include:

• If you show videos on your site, you should always have a separate video Sitemap
• Add the video transcript to the page to give you more content that is fully optimised (Speachpad)
• Test different holding screens to see which gives you the highest open rate
• Don’t only use YouTube to distribute your videos, some other great sites include Vzaar and Wistia
• Use Microformats to embed more information into the page about the video, giving you more chance to get the information about the video to appear in the search results

Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics
On day two, Liana Evans and Massimo Burgio engaged with the audience with a fun and exciting session on Facebook Marketing Tactics. Lots of tips and advice taken from their presentations but a few of my take away tips are:

• Engage, Engage, Engage… Don’t set up a Facebook page and not use it
• Tag other users/pages in your posts to promote your company on their own pages which gets your brand in front of a lot more eyes
• Keep your business page fresh and updated
• If using Facebook Paid Advertising, you should be testing new ads all the time. On average Facebook users view 12 pages each time they log on and the average user logs on three times a day. Showing the same ads all the time will cause ad blindness!
• Make sure your company has a social media policy, but that policy should not be to not let your staff utilise social! Giving your employees access to these sites to promote your brand is a great way of generating more brand exposure. The one liner social media policy should be…. Don’t Be Stupid, Think About What You Are Saying!

Massimo got the audience to watch a very funny video, which I think anyone who has used Facebook would love. Watch it here – Facebook Manners!

Lots of other great sessions but the above summarises my three standout ones from the two days. Great work from the SES team for arranging the conference!

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