I went to an early morning talk recently and I have to say it was certainly worthwhile getting up for. The breakfast briefing (organised by E-consultancy) was delivered by Andrew Girdwood of bigmouthmedia – a man who knows his stuff (and yours) when it comes to search. He was reeling slightly from the Google trademark shocker, but kept our attention with his succinct and informative overview of Universal Search.

Universal Search is something we all need to be aware of. Particularly those of us with heavy investments in online video content. Even if you don’t use video content or images much at the moment, the way that Google will now return a mix of results for will of course affect your web marketing strategy significantly. The basic premise, in terms of video search is this: Google will only show up videos that are hosted by, er, Google or YouTube. Apparently the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, etc. have been rather irked by this omission of their on-demand libraries, after all they’ve worked so hard to get the darn things online! And apparently Google’s answer was that they initially want to include content they can trust. You’d think the Beeb was slightly more trustworthy than the average teenager with a video phone, but what do I know!

So if you want Google to show up your videos in search results, you need to get it at least a teaser or highlight of it up on YouTube, if not the whole thing, and also plan promotion of that content, and respond to users’ comments, etc. Of course you also need to get lots of hits, and with the YouTube demographic being what it is, I still wonder if it’s worth it, unless you’re using the platform because it’s free anyway. But then I would say that wouldn’t I? People pay me to host their content. At the end of the day, there’s more than one way to skin an imaginary cat – and if you plan online PR carefully there’s lots you can do to stay on top. But be warned – if you don’t know about Universal Search you ought to find out soon. Things move pretty fast thesedays don’t they?