Notes Searchmasters09 Google India Event – Bangalore

March 17, 2009 by Anil
Filed under: Events India, Google Analytics, Search Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics India 

Late to write this, but here it goes :-)

The Searchmasters09 was indeed a great event to attend, one of the first event hosted by Google in India. This event had great sessions to keep one occupied for the entire day. Here’s a brief overview of what’ll happened in the event.

The event started with a talk from Vivaik Bharadwaaj (Manager of the Search Quality Evaluation team)  who spoke about why this conference was held, and also an introduction to the “Indian webmaster community” . He also gave a overview of Google’s initiatives in India and future plans.

He then shared some findings by Google about “India’s internet” status. Here are few important things i could make a note of

  • Internet users – 81 million
  • Internet subscribers 11.7 million (BB)
  • Mobile users – 287 million
  • Mobile internet capable 75.6 million
  • Mobile is the next big thing!

What works in Internet market in India, or rather what’s popular right now?

  1. Entertainment
  2. Education/job
  3. Banking/finance
  4. News/
  5. Travel
  6. Directory
  7. Others

On the terms of how sites in India are doing, here’s what Google Observed

  • Most site does not have robot.tx
  • No xml sitemaps ( majority of site dint have it )
  • Half of the sites analyzed dint have html sitemaps
  • Most of the site missing metatags.

India specific initiatives by Google

Orkut communities, India corporate blog, mobile search, transliteration tool, webmaster help forum, Google bus (a bus which is internet enabled, spreading knowledge of internet – started of in Chennai)

Webmaster Central and Beyond – Adam Lasnik – Mountain View

A sampling of best practices

  • Discovery (getting great pages discovered)
  • Accessibility (for googlebot and users)
  • Promotion (having your pages stand out)

What you can do with webmaster tools?

  • Diagnose issues: crawl errors, robot.txt concerns
  • Change settings: canonical domain, crawl speed
  • Get insights: Back links, referring keywords
  • Make improvements: enhanced 404 pages, sitemaps

Webmaster Best practices details

Discovery: Helping Google find our page

Sitemaps: A must have preferably in two formats

  • HTML: have this in your site
  • XML: this is great to have!

How do these help?

It tell the search engine, these are the pages I want you to look, these are the priority of the pages

Links: A bit more about links

Properties of good links

  • Just like good friends – attracted naturally
  • From trustworthy, relevant, choosy sources
  • Similar to votes: they’re given consciously

How can you get good links?

  • Create a notable site with original and compelling content
  • Participate thoughtfully in communities
  • Make pages easy to share and link to

Remember! Links that aren’t worth it

  • Those you beg, trade, bargain or pay for
  • Links from sources that aren’t respectable or selective

** don’t focus on beauty focus on function!

Content is really the foundation

Great Content is

  • Original: your own information or commentary
  • Compelling: People are likely to note and share it
  • Accessible: Users and Google bot can find and understand it

2.) Accessibility: Make your site accessible:

You site is accessible when users and googlebot can

  • load all the pages
  • Navigate successfully from page to page
  • See what’s on each page
  • Understand the content

Other points to ponder

  • And when users can bookmark their favorite pages, Homepage or even just “[company name]” is useless when reviewing history/bookmarks! Make sure page title is included as a best practices
  • Share pages with others Via social networks like orkut & facebook) business networks, email,im
  • Transact appropriately on your site ( submit forms, order materials, etc)
  • ** javascript are missing on many users, Ensure you have your site enabled for them
  • The most important word to remember is*****TEXT******, Even if it’s video, talk about it in text. Your core content and navigation should be in plain text

Testing Accessibility

  • Access your site with different browsers
  • This includes mobile browsers and screen readers
  • Also a text only browser, such as lynx
  • Or at minimum, a regular browser with JavaScript turned off
  • Make sure you not only browse but transact
  • Try submitting a form conducting a search etc
  • Have colleagues test it out

From accessibility to understanding

  • Ensure people and search engine understand what your pages are about
  • Create title tags, that are brief, descriptive, and compelling
  • Annotate photos with alt tags and user descriptive filenames
  • Add thoughtful text to give context
  • Effective use of Page titles

Good titles are

  • Specific to the page
  • Mention the company or organization
  • Are phrase based not a sentence
  • Making most of your images
  • Use alt text
  • Good Example: src=googlebot.jpg” alt =” googlebot with flowers”
  • Bad Example: googlebot photos with flowrers
  • Use descriptive filenames
  • Describe appropriately in plain text
  • Be Kind: Optimize your images for users.

Suggestions for Images, videos and more non text!

  • Use Points to check for / questions asked
  • *video xml
  • *transcript of the videos will help!
  • Keyword density does not have huge importance
  • Business name:city:what the page is about ( do not repeat it many times)

Google Custom Search! Rajat Mukherjee (Product Manager – Google Custom Search platform)

One of the most widely used internal search tools, It helps customize the Index, Ranking and Presentation

Why CSE

  1. Users today use search to navigate sites and find information
  2. Search integrated in minutes using look and feel of your own site
  3. Better user retention via target search instant high relevance
  4. Better clickthru rates and conversion on your site
  5. Enhanced indexing via cse index and on demand index
    1. On demand indexing: give a portion of your site all content will be indexed within 24 hours
  6. Features such as labels, synonyms, date biasing, promotions
    1. Synonyms/acronyms – you can now promote certain things for select queries (can be urls or information)
  7. Monetize with relevant ads via custom search keywords
    1. Features like, add keywords for relevant ads
  8. Advanced api’s customization, branding and support options
    1. Branding options available
  9. Integrated with Google platform, webmasters tools, sitemaps

Google Analytics and Google Web Optimizer:

This session was an Introduction to Google anlaytics and Google Web Optimizer tool. The following was covered in this session.

  • Introduction and capabilites of Google Anlaytics
  • Implementation and new features
  • Google Analytics Custom Segmentation
  • Tracking Campaigns and rich media
  • Google Analytics reports explanation
  • Google weboptimizer introduction
  • Using A/B Test and Multivariate tests
  • Advantages of Testing
  • Resources and Help

Next Steps by Google as some suggested is

  • Hold more events in India
  • Dedicated events to other Google products used by web masters

P.S: these were the random notes i took. There are few more folks who wrote about the event, find the links below.

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Comments

3 Comments on Notes Searchmasters09 Google India Event – Bangalore

  1. Rajan C on Thu, 19th Mar 2009 5:24 am

    2. Hi Anil,
    Its so good coverage on the event! Missed Mani karthik during SearchCamp’09.
    Thanks and Regards,
    Rajan C

  2. Anil on Thu, 19th Mar 2009 6:05 am

    3. Ranjan
    Glad you found it useful!

  3. Rakesh Paladugula on Tue, 22nd Dec 2009 4:44 am

    4. Good to see accessibility talks by Google India.

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