I’m writing this blog entry having spent the day at the York Railway Museum attending a S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) workshop and training course. In today’s fast pace of life, business owners need to try and be one step ahead of the competition. In the past, customers dug out the old yellow pages, thumbed the pages and used the land line phone to make contact with the owner of the shop. Now you can get your smart phone out of your pocket, type in a few words and have hundreds of options in the palm of your hand within a few seconds. Facebook and Twitter feeds can be accessed within seconds. The European Union has provided millions of pounds for Business owners to get free advice, training and guidance via one to one meetings and also choose from the many workshops they have on offer. Social Media was a huge part of the workshop. The guy when ran the workshop was very interested in the amount of sales I take via social media. I gave the group various examples of customer orders I had some in the past via my Facebook, Twitter and Ebay accounts.
Having sat in many ‘meetings about meetings’ in my past career (trying to keep awake by counting roof tiles) this was one of the best courses I’ve attended. It catered for all levels of experience with some people only having a basic single page website, while others had gone racing off doing hundreds of things to make it onto the magical page one of a google search. In previous weeks Google have moved the goalposts slightly to favour the ‘searcher’ rather than the company trying everything and anything to be better than his or her rival. In 2014 & 2015, even more changes are due to find the correct answer to the question put into the search bar.