The “Getting Found in All the Right Places” event on November 7th in Newton, MA was a huge success! Around 90 search marketers from all over New England had registered to attend, and tons of new contacts and friendships were formed during the hour of networking that preceded the main speaker.

For those of us who have attended all of the past SEMNE events, this 5th one proved to be one of the best yet. There was a great chemistry between the mix of individuals who were there, due in part to the fact that there were so many familiar faces. That said, there were a good number of first time attendees as well.

The presentation from Greg Jarboe on getting found in all the right places, was well received by the audience. Greg spoke a lot about Google’s new “universal search,” which many people didn’t know much about yet. The case studies that Greg showed us from his own clients, was an excellent way to illustrate exactly what he was explaining to us.

Here are the major points Greg covered:

• Universal search is hard!
• Universal search changes people’s eye scanning patterns when they look at search engine results pages.
• YouTube is the 3rd largest search engine, which means there are many new opportunities for search marketers, but also new threats (for those that aren’t paying attention).
• It’s more important than ever to get your PR dept. or company involved in your SEO.
• Be sure to add visuals to your press releases.
• Find opportunities and keywords via Google Trends
• Press releases that use multimedia get 2.5 times more readers than those that don’t!
• Yahoo news and AOL news have live, human editors who will take story ideas. They love video, so pitch it to them!
• None of this matters if you don’t start with a compelling story and know where to pitch it.
• Your interesting stories will get linked to from bloggers and that blog traffic will often be more than 10 times the traffic you’ll receive from the story itself.

Greg also mentioned that he and Amanda Watlington are doing a 4-hour training session on this subject at the upcoming Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference.

If you’re interested in attending that conference, SEMNE just so happens to have a 10% discount for its members. Learn more about SEMNE member offers.

Missed out on this event? Here’s where you can learn about upcoming SEMNE events.