Search Camp 2009 Event in Chennai

Search Camp 2009

Day : 1
Date: 28.02.09

Panel Discussion

Organic v/s Paid Search - Which is more sustainable?

The members in the panel were

• Mr. Arun Rajamani, GM, Sify Technologies Ltd.,
• Mr. Akbar Lalani, Vice President, Decatrend Technologies
• Mr. Kapil Nakra, CEO, OMLogic

Some of the topics that came up for discussion included:

• The role of Organic in branding
• Is paid traffic more viable in ROI
• Organic Search is not tangible as Paid Search.
• In Paid Search, you can focus on the consumer needs precisely.
•In the long run, Organic Search gives better result.
• Paid search can give instantaneous results and is a great bet to stay afloat during tough competition. Paid and Organic Search complement each other.

Website Usability - Improving User Experience

Mr. Vishal Sampat, CEO, Convonix spoke about Website Usability.

Vishal opined that motivation and clarity are keys to usability. A successful web site should convey the uniqueness to the visitor in less than 10 seconds before which he moves away from your site. Online marketing could be largely benefited by incentives.

While dealing with Conversions, definition of the right conversion metric could be crucial. One should be able to filter the visitors by Channel for bigger and better results. In case the conversion process is taking a lot of time to get executed , a Phase Level Conversion track could be considered.

Measuring Conversion:

Conversions can be measured by the following methods
• Set up a Channel Map to monitor conversions from each marketing channel
• A Channel Map is a good tool to measure the motivation of your users apart from the type and magnitude of the customer

During the meeting, the importance of keywords were also highlighted. Keywords are useful to identify the visitor's buying cycle stage. For instance, if the visitor is keying in generic keywords, he could only be in the ‘interest phase’ whereas if the visitor inputs specific product keywords, he is somewhere near the ‘buying stage’.

Some of the site elements that have generic significance include the Headlines, Introduction, Benefits Statement, graphics and Images and Content.

He also highlighted some of the common errors like landing forms crammed with too many fields and vague expression of value proposition or side column pages carrying primary offer content. Images without headings and restricting all the efforts to one single page are some of the other common mistakes.

Make the site simple for the customer, do not lose sight of your primary goal and separate the visitors using a well laid out channel map after getting all the essential data.

Brain Storming

Mr. Kiruba,he CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd. conducted the brain buzzing session in the afternoon. The participants were asked to talk for a minute about their ideas or trouble shooting experiences. The participants could also ask for solutions from the audience for any challenges they have faced.

Some of the topics that were featured in the brain storming session included but not restricted to the following
Spyfew.com
Major differences between B2C and B2B
Woopra
Canonical URL
Westorange.com
Specific geographical ranking of Google
Site codes which are optimized for Blind People


Keyword Research by Abdul Khimani

Mr. Abdul Khimani, SEO Project manager, Convonix, handled an informative session on ‘Keyword Research’. He defined Keyword Research as the ‘Art of identifying the most optimum performance’ for the market. He explained the various types SEO, including Primary/Generic Keywords, Secondary/More Specific Keywords and Tertiary/Long Tails Keywords

He also talked in detail about the different Keyword Tools in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Google is the leader in the segment, which takes credit of 70% of users. Apart from the most popular Google Adwords, Google has many other Keyword Tools like, Google Trend Charts, Google insights for search, which is an extension of Google Trend Charts and Keyword Insights.

Keyword Analysis Technique encompass various procedures like researching on existing keyword rankings, keyword search volumes, number of competitor web pages and keyword mapping to relevant pages. Google also offers Keyword Effectiveness Index which is Ratio of search volumes to competition.

He concluded by saying that Keyword Research is not a Science but is a repetitive process.

E- Commerce SEO

The participants also got an opportunity to have an online conference with Mr. Sri Nagubandi, Director, SEO, Rosetta.

He talked about the various challenges faced by the E-commerce SEO including the Platform used, bad Codes, Lack of Control and templates that limit Copy.

He stressed on the importance of having clean codes with perfect Semantic Structure and Natural Language URL’s. Most of the onsite challenges could be tackled by doing keyword research and working on the Custom Titles and H tags with keywords. Last but not least make sure that the content of the site is in fact written by people and not machine generated.

Some of the offline challenges include ease to link the various products, which can be easily bookmarked, shared or emailed among the users. Also check on the following..

* Do you allow Reviews?
* Do you Twitter your new products?
* Do you ask for Links?

He also spoke about the importance to adapt SEO according to the Size. If it is a small one with less than 100 products, a simple CMS platform can be used. Build the content around the product through regular postings of well optimized content

For a medium sized one, with products between 100 to 1000, technical issues need to be considered. Optimization of the Main Categories and Key Products is important; planning a daily or weekly product optimization and link development could be helpful. The SEO landing pages are crucial for the success of any website and hence these deserve special attention.

If the products are more than 1000, you should make the technical aspects of a platform should be faultless. You could have a weekly, monthly on-site optimization plan apart from building SEO landing pages and links on a weekly basis. Make sure that your making progress every week

Conclusion

• Never settle for ready made solutions as no two websites are alike!
• Focus on the facts that would bring in more hits and money
• Set up analytics that track conversions and reports revenues.
• Monitor your progress on a weekly basis
• Do not overlook link development

Web Analytics – What’s Next

Trinadh Rao, Country Manager (India) of Web Analytics Association talked about the latest happenings in Web Analytics.

The Web Analytics Industry is undergoing change at a fast pace all over the world and also in India. One Indian Company has been listed in Forrester report on “Web Analytics Professional Service Firms”. Communicate 2, an Indian Company has become a GAAC company. Ms. Rhema from Communicate 2, who is the first GAAC member, was also present in the conference.

she said that ‘Change is a Challenge’. Every other moment the things keeps changing and we need to understand the limitations of technology. As a single tool or technology cannot cater to the demands of the visitors in providing comprehensive website information, testing should be given prime importance. Integrations and the usability of the team are equally important.

Useful References
Web Analytics FREE book,
Web analytics Demystified - Eric pieterson

Useful Tools:

- Woopra ( http://www.woopra.com/) - Website Tracking and Analytics, like Google analytics.
- Firebox tools, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=tools&cat=all
- Keyword fight tool - http://www.googlefight.com/
- Custom 404 errprs page – Need to redirect some information pages.
- Spyfu - http://www.spyfu.com/ - Find your competitors keywords and adwords

Canonical URL

- Multiple URL's pointing the same url location.


Day 2:
Date: 01.03.09

Adam Lasnik Seminar

The star attraction of the Search Camp was the presence of Adam Lasnik who came all the way from Google. He is Google’s first Search Evangelist and enhances the company’s online and offline communications with Webmasters.

Rather than a formal presentation, Adam switched to an informative and interesting Q&A session, which ensured the participation of everyone and proved more beneficial.

Lots of interesting as well as quirky questions popped up during this session. One of it was “Is Wikipedia a paid partner of Google and why is it that it always ranks top irrespective of the nature of SEO for that site?” All had a hearty laugh and Adam said that there were no tie ups between these two companies.

The popularity of Wiki is due to its brand loyalty among its regular customers. Catchy titles is something special about Wiki. In addition, Wikipedia serves as a comprehensive, one stop destination for all the details that the user might wish to have. Wikipedia is organic and caters to all the search needs of the users and hence it is always ranked top.

He opined that local language content might be useful in local search, which would give the users a personalized feeling. Local addresses also would be good to connect to the maximum number of targets users.

As far as the sites are concerned he said the audience that “If you are not using XML site map, do it!” Also make sure that you check the crawl errors in the Webmaster tools whenever site modifications were done.

He gave a lot of tips and cleared many common doubts regarding Google Search. It was interesting to note that the discussions were not confined to the Question hour during the session, but also spilled over to informal hours during lunch and later!

Advanced SEO: Strategies & Techniques

An online conference on Advanced Techniques in SEO’ hosted by Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts was the other attarction of the session.

He said “if you need to win Google, you need to think outside the box”. A Scientific Approach holds the key for successful search ranking. He also explained how results from the same site were grouped together by Google and how that affects ranking.

Concentrate on some of the essential factors including the internal linking structure, PageRank Sculpting, alternative linking structures like tags, tag clouds, etc. original content a perfect site architecture like the url’s, html codes, templates, AJAX, etc of the site can influence the page rank flow.

A bit of strategic thinking would do the trick. Though inbound links do matter, internal links also are important to evenly distribute the home page rank into the deeper pages of the site. Links are the currency of the web as far as SEO is concerned.

Spare a glance to some of the most important aspects of internal linking such as the site hierarchy, proper site map, tagging and breadcrumb navigation, which shows the user’s path to the current location in the site. Tagging ensures effective deep internal linking apart from generating keyword rich links.

He then spoke about Indexation. The greater your trust or authority or page rank is, the deeper and more often the site gets crawled. Also keep a tab on the crawl equity to ensure that it is not distributed too thin. Google has two indices; the main and supplemental and make sure that you stay off from the supplemental index. Some tips on finding the right indexation were also discussed during this session.

PR sculpting also came up for discussion and he spoke in detail on how to manage the flow using nofollow on unimportant links. Tools such as Server head checkers, SEOmoz’s Link Check, etc would help to check if they really flow. Remember, Link juice dissipates due to dynamic url’s, session id’s or user ids in url and superfluous flags in url.

Some of the other aspects that concerns Google may be the age of domain, age of site, link buying footprint, historical transgressions, spammy TLD(eg. .info), quality of link neighbourhood, the number of subdomains, etc

Discussion with Adam Lasnik (Search Evangelist) and Vivaik (Search Quality Team) Google.com

Kumar : Hi Adam, Google Launched “Chrome” web browser, but it is not having any toolbar Add ons like Google PR checker toolbar and other webmaster Toolbars which are available in Firefox browser?

Adam : Ya, we have launched only for trial. First we want to create a successful browser, then we will implement all the add ons which are very useful for webmasters and users.

Kumar : I have used the Chrome when it was launched. I got hanged several times, and I stopped using that. What could be the reason for this ?

Adam : Ahh! Is it hanging? I regularly use it and never found hanging before. Could you tell me for which site it is hanging?

Kumar : I used chrome long time before. So not sure about the site. But it is hanging for Highly secured sites like banking sites ;due to this hanging problem I stopped using that. As a webmaster I have used all types of browsers and am feeling comfortable with firefox.

Adam : Ohh! I will check. Thank you for the feedback. Hope you will get it as a perfect Browser in future.


Kumar : Adam, I am working for an online tourism project targeting the worldwide touristers. But we are having only one option for geo targetting on webmaster tools. Is there any other option to target more locations?

Adam : Ahh! Most of the persons have asked similar questions. You can place separate pages on your site for the targeted locations. If you are using the local languages, It will give you an additional benefit.

Kumar : But Adam it is not possible for all the regions. English is the common language and we have placed common content for all locations. Could we use any Translator Tool for translation. And another thing is that if we are creating a separate page only the language differs. This might cause duplicate content issue also. Will it affect the site?

Adam : It's a good question. You need not worry about the copy content. We can understand it's difficult to create different content for same business in different regions. You can translate the same content in the local languages. If you are doing manual translation, it will be more effective. I don't think translation tool can give exact meaning of the sentence.

Vivaik : Ya! I have seen several funny sentences when translating through translator tool. Somewhat poetical sentences will give the funny meanings in local language. For example I have translated a Spanish sentence into one of Indian languages it gave the meaning of “Cut your Nose and pick it in hand” . Actually that is the poetical sentence. (Everyone laughed). It's better using the manual translation content.

Adam : Or else you can use the the regional flag and name in that regional pages. It will be helpful to perform well in Google results.


Kumar : Hi Vivaik ! In Google we are having a option for worldwide search and pages from region. Could you explain how it is working?

Vivaik : It is a very good feature to give the most appropriate result to the users. If you are searching with worldwide you will get the results from all over the world. And another option is for particular regional results. I think as a webmaster you know this.

Kumar : Ya! I know this. Just my query is, Is this working dependent on relevant content or the site hosted server region? I am working with one of the Indian tourism projects. Site contains the regional tour related content. When I am making the wordwide search in Google.co.in my site is in the first page. At the same time not resulting in top 100 results while making search with pages from India. What causes such different results?

Vivaik : You are saying some what different issue. Where is hosted server located

Kumar : It is located in UK. It is resulting in 1st page of Google UK (pages from UK search).

Vivaik : It might be one of the reasons, but I am not sure about this. Basically We are resulting the quality content based only. I am not sure, server location might be the reason on this issue. Anyway try up in Google webmaster forum. You will get the exact answer.

Kumar : In search results Google added a new feature where people can pass their comment. What is the use of this?
Vivaik : This is a good feature which could give more info about the site. If user likes any site he/she could pass the comment on that site and other users can see that comment also.

Kumar : Ya! I accept this. But at the same time someone (competitors) could make wrong impression on the particular site through this feature and it could result in the loss of business to that particular site. What is your opinion about this spammers? Will these comments affect the SERP of that site?

Vivaik : No. It definitely won't affect the Search Result. It is only for providing more information about the site. We won't consider these comments in search results. And your point is good. Other persons could make bad comments on their competitor sites. In such cases we will make investigation and remove that particular comment.



Kumar: If we use many sub domains, is it good or bad for the site?

Vivaik: That depends on your site. It won't affect the result.

Kumar : My company bought a website which was owned by One of the US companies. They are also one part of our company. They have given access of the main domain. But not given the Subdomain access. They are also not using that subdomains. At the same time we found that subdomain was redirected to another domain and that domain contains all the content which was in that subdomain including the template design. This thing was happened without their knowledge. What could we do on this issue ?

Vivaik : I think this is legal issue. Anyway ask this question to Adam. He is the correct person to answer this. ( Then we moved to Adam. Me and Vivaik explained the issue)

Adam : I think this is an agreement problem. Google can't do any thing on this issue. You should go for legal actions.

Kumar : As I said earlier, I am working with an online tourism project. Previously this site had HTML pages. Now we have migrated with Joomla CMS technique. While migration we did some mistakes on configuration. Due to that multiple URLs have been created for the same page and URL operating with both the upper and lower cases. When we found this issue, we decided to change the entire URL in to Lower case and made perfect 301 redirection to the corresponding URL. Is that correct procedure?

Adam : Ya! It is very good decision. It will avoid the canonical Issues and improve the site performance.
Kumar : But I am facing a different issue now.

Adam : Is that causing some problem? what is the issue on this ?

Kumar : My site is having more than 10000 pages. In those pages my highly targeted business pages are hardly 100 pages. In previous days these pages performed well in SERP and most of results came in top 5 positions. But after doing the URL changes. It's performance gone in reversal. That means which were the pages performed in top 5 positions, they are resulting after 5 pages. And those pages that fared badly are featuring in top 10 results. Any idea about this issue?

Adam : Oh! This is very different problem. Could you tell me How many days before you did this URL changes?

Kumar : Just 3 weeks before.

Adam : Ok! It's quite different issue. Anyway do some more workouts on those pages and make some new updates. Google might crawl and bring the old position. Apart from that I don't have any other Idea about this issue.


These All are only My Questions. Most of persons asked him Lots of Questions. They have clarified. Our most of queries. Thank You Adam & Vivaik. I have spent a very Useful Time on this Weekend.