Friday 4 December 2009

Nottingham eBusiness Conference

What an excellent day yesterday at the ebusinessclub online marketing conference held at Nottingham Conference Centre.

Officially there were 525 places available, but noticing that additional seating had been squeezed in, and that there was I understand a long, long, waiting list, I suspect the actual figure may have been closer to 600.

Speaking in the morning was Ian Lockwood, with 'what's new in search?', and in the afternoon, Susan Hallam 'Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses'.

The last time I wrote so many notes must've been in my 'pre-PC' days, writing up college assignments, as all I seem to write these days are shopping lists for the supermarket!
It doesn't end there, or certainly shouldn't:

Watch, Learn, Apply, Measure!

At the beginning of the day, I started out with a simple list with headings such as -
'to do',
'research',
'discuss with (Phil) the web developer',
Throwing in symbols, circles, etc.

But there ended up so much content - and a few symbols went astray, that it's taken a fair bit of review and type up, to actually get to my working list.
The main points I learned for the first time were:
Changes in breadcrumbs, (Google),
Adding video and images to your Local Business Listing (seo),
Loadspeeds more considered (seo),
The growing importance of social media, and 'real-time search' (seo),
Caffeine: indexing deeper than previously,
'grabbing the space' - the organic results, on that sought for Page One (more paid for results possible / likely),
Domain Authority - still very much a plus,
Anchor text - 'slightly more important'
Livestreaming - the benefits, applications,
Utilising social media for your / your market (etc) 'mention',
Adding blog snippets to LinkedIn (etc),
Keeping it S.M.A.R.T.