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