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Notes Searchmasters09 Google India Event – Bangalore

Anil — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:10:36 +0000

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?

Entertainment
Education/job
Banking/finance
News/
Travel
Directory
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

Users today use search to navigate sites and find information
Search integrated in minutes using look and feel of your own site
Better user retention via target search instant high relevance
Better clickthru rates and conversion on your site
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
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)
Monetize with relevant ads via custom search keywords
1. Features like, add keywords for relevant ads
Advanced api’s customization, branding and support options
1. Branding options available
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.

Two Word Search Phrases used most on google

Anil — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:59:00 +0000

Here’s an intresting research done of number of words used to search on google, as per the research done by onestat, Internet users who type two words for on a search engine query account for 31.9 percent of searches worldwide while three-word phrases are used for 27 percent of searches. A single word accounts for 15.2 percent of queries, and four words are used for 14.8 percent of searches.

“Search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo can drive a lot of
traffic to a Web site,” said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat. “It is
important that a Webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they
have to use.”

Instances with five (6.5 percent); six (2.7 percent); seven (1.1 percent); eight (0.5 percent); nine (0.2 percent); and 10 (0.1 percent) words are used in fewer searches.

OneStat.com collects data through its Web analytics services. Numbers are averages. Research is based on a daily sample of two million Web visitors from 100 countries.

Courtesy: Clickz

Search Marketing Strategies for Holiday Season 2007

Anil — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:43:00 +0000

With Holiday season 2007 approaching fast, Online retailers are gearing up and making changes to campaigns and their marketing strategies.

The yahoo search marketing team shares their finding from the research and also few pointers to optimize your site for the upcoming holiday season. Here’s the excerpt from the post.

Holiday Highlights
According to comScore, online consumer spending grew 26 percent in 2006 to $24.4 billion. More than 80 percent of consumers did at least some shopping online (BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006), and 50 percent of shoppers bought more stuff online in 2006 than 2005 (NielsenNetRatings research). It’s a pretty telling trend. (For what it’s worth, last year I did all of my holiday shopping online for the first time.)

The Yahoo! Search Marketing team has prepared some tips for advertisers based on the holiday data we gathered:

Engage the bargain hunters—According to the BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006, nearly half of the consumers polled named “free shipping” as a primary motivator to purchase. Other shoppers named “online only sales” and “repeat buyer discounts.”

Primary motivator to purchase is indeed a great input from yahoo marketing team, Using terms like these on campaign landing page would be a huge bonus during the Holiday season.

Keywords count—According to our internal data, “Christmas” was, not surprisingly, the most holiday-related search term in 2006 with more than three million average monthly searches. Other popular terms included “Christmas decoration,” “Hanukkah,” “holiday gift” and “gift for dad.” Make sure that your keyword selection includes holiday-related keywords and seasonal products and promotions.

Holiday related, seasonal related, and seasonal promotion related keywords is what one needs to optimize/ensure exists on respective product/service page.

Titillate with titles—Titles and descriptions can drive relevance and clicks, so it’s a best practice when creating specific holiday ad groups to place the holiday term prominently in both the title and the description, and include any special seasonal promotions in the copy.

Review your current titles and making appropriate changes to both title and description to include the seasonal and holiday related keywords will help increase relevance.

Clear for landing—Make sure that your landing pages are relevant to your keywords, ad copy and any promotions. Nothing’s more frustrating for a consumer to click on an ad that says, “Get 10% off” something and then land on a page where that information is either absent or buried. Prices and promotions should be consistent with ad copy.

By ensuring the above two criteria are met, a clear landing page will help drive conversion. A clear “headline” and a visible “Conversion Exit” will help smooth flow of the conversion.

Combine search with display and offline advertising— Make sure you include your keywords and consistent copy in your display and offline marketing material.

Content courtesy: Yahoo marketing Blog