SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

I have been thinking about writing this SEO guide for quite some time now but my firm belief of the fact that no one can learn SEO by reading an article or book was preventing me from convincing myself about the usefulness of this SEO training guide. However on a second thought, I felt that there must be some starting point for beginners. Though everything in the SEO industry changes really fast there are certain good practices that remains constant and all throughout my career as I have extensively depended on those simple principles for my SEO success, I thought it would be a good idea to share it with my readers.

I know there are a lot many articles on the internet that speaks about the basic SEO process and would cover most points that are included in this guide to search engine optimization, however, none of those guides (at least the ones that I have come across) covers the finer points and that is where lies the key to SEO success. Everyone is aware that it takes flour, eggs, sugar, butter to make a good cake but the mastery lies in mixing them in correct proportion, in correct way and then baking it to the perfect temperature. My objective of writing this SEO training Guide is to cover those finer points of the scientific art of search engine optimization.

I must say this is definitely not the ultimate guide to SEO, there are much more to it but if you read this SEO guide completely and understand how to implement it you will definitely have a very solid starting point. At the same time there are certain points mentioned in this guide which are probably not the best things to do ideologically but for effective SEO (particulalrly when you have relatively small budget) they are indispensible.

The SEO Guide is too big to be put in one blog post, so I have uploaded it to a location and you can use this link to download the PDF file. Download Guide to Effective SEO.

If you are a SEO newbie I would definitely like to know if this document helped you at all to understand SEO and if you are a SEO pro it would be great if you can put in your suggestions to improve this guide.

Labels: guide, search engine, search engine optimization, search marketing, SEO, training

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After a not so good sleep last night I managed to reach the Tidel Park auditorium to attend the second day of the Search Camp Conference in time. However, the conference had to wait for a good 15-20 minutes to start off as most participants were probably enjoying the lazy Sunday morning.

After attending the Delhi SEO Meet this is my second conference and I must say that in this 6-7 months time Indian search conference has really come off age. While the Delhi SEO Meet was commendable for being the first of its type in India the topics discussed were pretty basic, however Search Camp did see a few good discussion and was a good platform for the agencies and the clients to interact.

It was particularly good to meet some of my blog readers whom I have often seen on my BLOGLOGO widget.

While I am not really the kind of person to note details of every discussion I did make a kind of summary log of the conversations as I was planning to make this blog post. So here you go..

Ratan from Pinstorm presented “Song & Dance for Click” where his key emphasis was on understanding the intent of the client and the prospective target group. A very valid and useful presentation; particularly the part where he discussed about the necessary information that an agency needs to get to design a good SEM campaign. The Q & A session at the end of the presentation however was more informative than the presentation itself. His intentional efforts to blend in some humour into his presentation were well received by part of the crowd.

Vikram – Director of eFrontier presented on “Algorithm in SEM” where he focussed on the requirement for forecasting of clicks, costs and CPA. He suggested that for all campaigns there is an effective position where the campaign gets the least CPA and that is the point where the companies should head for. He also stretched that investing more into a campaign once a campaign has reached its optimum level would probably increase sales volume or number of leads , however, the CPA is going to increase. So in this situation the companies need to make a choice whether they want to maximize revenue at the cost of increased CPA or operate at the optimum level with minimum CPA.

Harish & Vikram from the PinStorm Science team was there to present on the tools they have been developing and how those can help in SEM campaigns. Unfortunately, and if I may say, a bit unprofessionally they were interrupted a number of times by Ratan ( from PinStorm) and once he even walked upto the podium to stop them from discussing some of the details. While it is absolutely valid from the company’s perspective to safeguard their proprietary information, it would probably been a good idea to have pre-planned and audited the presentation rather than those multiple interruption when the show was on.

Vivek Bhargava from Communicate2 did his presentation on The Future of Advertising which was definitely good and Vivek’s communication and presentation skill did make it all the more enjoyable. It was interesting when Vivek was discussing the idea of having contextual ad on digital TV when ads would be served based on customer profiles.

BlackHat presentation by Blackhat guy – Well the presentation was nothing but a copy of Wikipedia BUT the way it was presented was extraordinary. The presenter never came up on the podium and it was staged to give a feel the voice is coming from behind the wings. This was enough for the house to be curious and keep guessing who the person might be. However, at the end of the presentation he did come out from his hide out and declared himself as a white hat SEO.

There was a short impromptu presentation by Jyothirmoyee on how she thinks that businesses with very small budgets can take advantage of SEM. She stressed extensively on the use of long tailed keywords and even using them for Exact match.

This was followed by a presentation by my friend SEO bloggerMani. He discussed some ideas on how to optimize blogs. He did express his choice of self hosted Wordpress blogs as one of the best blogging platforms from SEO perspective and did share a lot of tips with the audience.

Venkat was next to follow with a question hour type session where he tarted throwing a volley of questions to the audience and that did get the house to hear a good many opinion for each questions. There were a good number of questions that were directed towards the few Googlers who were there; however, as it has always been with Google- they knew how to give politically correct answers.

The last two sessions were for panel discussions, the first one was a face to face round off with the heads of two media agencies and two major businesses that do their SEM inhouse.

The panel consisted of Vivek from C2, Rajesh Sule from Position 2, and the CEO s of BharatMatrimony and Sulekha.com. The discussion revealed that companies that do thei SEM inhouse are mainly concerned about sharing data and are not sure of the commitment that they would get from agency staff. At the same time Vivek and Rajesh put up their point that if the companies have never worked with an agency how they can doubt their commitment or integrity. Though the discussion did not conclude with any definitive result, it as an enjoyable session.

The second panel discussion was on SEO for Web 2.0. The panel had Ashwin Ramesh - the 16 year old entrepreneur, Mani Karthik, myself and someone from eFrontier. The panel tried to address some of the concerns that the house has showsn earlier about the extensive use of Ajax and other search engine unfriendly technologies used in Web 2.0. Ashwin suggested use of sites like Digg, Del.icio.us etc which was followed by me with some tips on SMO. Also to address some concerns about use of Flash I suggested the use of sIFR. Mani came up with a very valid point which was more about understanding the concept of Web 2.0 and not really using it for anything and everything you do on the web.

There was a pleasant surprise for four of us at the end of the discussion when Sulekha.com (one of the sponsors) presented a laptop back pack to each of us.

Well, if you are not tired after reading this and still want to read you will probably need to take a break because I am tired :(. I will be posting some pics of the Search Camp, which will probably give some more insight of the event to you guys.

Labels: india, Searchcamp.in, SEM, SEM conference, SEO, SEO conference, SEO Meet, Web2.0

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After the Delhi SEO Meet in last April, it’s again time for a Search conference in India and I just managed to get a chance to sneak in at the last moment. Search Camp 2007 was scheduled to be held in Tidal Park, Chennai on 6th-7th October and unfortunately I was so preoccupied with my office works I wasn’t aware of it till Saturday 2.30pm when one of my SEO friend pinged me to ask why am I not their in the conference. Better late than never, a quick chat with Ravi (my boss) got me the approval to take off to Chennai for attending the Sunday session of Search Camp.

While Delhi SEO Meet was a good effort keeping in mind it was the first of its kind in India, Search Camp 2007 had a much wider scope in terms of the number of participants, their profile and the topics discussed. The point that caught my attention the most with the topics of discussion at Search Camp is that they also had a Black Hat guy to present and being a White hat (ok, I agree, at times Grey ;) ) , I have a lot of inquisitiveness to learn the intricacies of high end black hat ( not that I plan to apply it, but its always good to learn ).

Reached Chennai at 10.00pm I night and could manage to get an accommodation at Hotel President after being given a full house response by four other hotels. Need to catch a good sleep now and see how the search camp goes tomorrow.

Labels: 2007, Chennai, india, Search Conference, Searchcamp.in, SEO conference, SEO Meet

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