SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

** Added on 1st March, 2009
Arrived a little late at Search Camp. Stephen from Net concept is giving a presentation on SEO through video conferencing. The slides look a bi outdated though ( they still talk about "supplemental hell").

Would not be able to live blog the session as I am completely down with cold and flu. But will definiely take a note of the stuff happening and making a proper post later. My sincere apologies to all my readers, please bear with me.
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I would also be attending the second day session of Search Camp 2009 in Chennai on 1st March and plan to live blog the session as well.

If you would like to experience the live coverage or participate in the discussion you can do so by signing up for the live coverage below.

Labels: india, Live blogging, Search Camp 2009, Search Conference

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As I mentioned in my earlier posts I would be attending the Search Masters 2009 conference in Bangalore on 28th February. I have had discussions with many other people from the industry who wanted to participate in the conference but are unable to do so due to various reasons, so I have decided to live blog the entire conference ( I am expecting Google would not have an issue with that ). Through this new live blogging platform you can also participate in the Search Masters Conference by sending me your questions which I can place to the panelists during the conference.

The conference is sheduled to start from 8 am on 28th Feb. You can however, sign up for a reminder below.

Apologies to my readers I couldn't continue withthe live blogging yetsreday as my laptop ran dry and though they had charging points for Laptops, they were set in a different room. So charging my aptop would have meant missing some part of the conference.

However, I have taken a detailed summary of all the discussions and would be publishing them over the next few days.

Labels: Bangalore, Conference, Google, Search Conference, Search Masters 2009

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Well, I haven't yet packed my bags for the Search Masters 2009 and we have one more search conference in Chennai - Search Camp 2009. It would be held at Tidel Park auditorium on 28th Feb and 1st of March .

Though I was initially planning to attend only the Indian Search Masters Conference, I have changed my mind and now I am all set to catch the action at Search Camp on the second day. It is going to be a pretty hectic weekend for me but probably it would be worth the effort given the fact that its just once a year that we get to have such a great gathering of search marketing professionals across the country.

I plan to live blog the sessions at Search Masters as well as Search Camp and in case you guys have any specific questions that you would like to be put forward in any of these sessions please feel free to do so and I would be happy to put forward your question in the sessions wherever its applicable and post back the answers on my blog.

As of now my schedule looks like..

• 27th Feb evening - Fly to Bangaluru
• 28th Feb morning - Attend Google Search Master 2009
• 28th Feb Evening - Fly to Chennai
• 1st March Morning - Attend Search Camp 2nd Day session
• 1st March Evening - Flying back home ( Hyderabad)

You can also read last year's updates on Search Camp conference here.

Labels: Search Camp, Search Conference, Search Masters 2009, SEO conference

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Google took over Feedburner around June 2007 and now they require all Feedburner accounts to move over to Google account. Today when I logged in to my Feedburner account it didn't let me go anywhere without migrating the account first. So I had to do the migration and am really worried about it.

Now my feed URL has changed from http://feeds.feedburner.com/seokolkata to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/seokolkata. I have updated the links on the sidebar and as Google mentions that the old URL will automatically redirect to the new one you should not be facing any issue if you are subscribed to the old feed URL.

Just in case if you see that your content is not getting updated or any problem due to this migration I would request you to please resubscribe.

And in case you have nevere subscribed to this blog feed before may be it si a good time for you to do it now :)

Labels: feed readers, Feedburner, Google, Subscribe to feeds

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Canonical URLs have always been a serious concern for most webmasters and SEO . Though solutions like 301 redirection of canonical URLs have been suggested time and again it is not really the easiest to implement and particularly for SEO s who are not highly tech savvy.

Google earlier has provided the option by which you can indicate which version of your website URL ( www or non www ) would you like them to show but that was not a complete solution for canonical issues.

Recently all the search engines have come together to find a easy solution to the canonical problem and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have given the news officially on their blogs.

If your site has identical or almost similar content on multiple pages you can indicate one of these URLs as the canonical URL for the search engines to display. This can be now done by simply adding the <link> tag to the preferred version, inside the section of the duplicate content URLs.

For example, if you have the following URLs with same content..
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue
http://www.domain.com/product.php?cat=widgets&col=blue
http://www.domain.com/product.php?c=23bd&did=144
http://www.domain.com/product.php?cat=widgets&col=blue&sessionid=232424242323

You would obviously like the search engines to consider the URL
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue

For this, all you have to do is add the following tag within the <head> of the other pages.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue" />

This would be good enough for the search engines to understand that all the duplicate URLs refer to the canonical URL and accordingly Google would transfer PR and additional URL properties to the preferred URL.

A few points that you must keep in mind while using this canonical tag :

• This works only internally and not across domains
• Search engines treat this in a fashion similar to a 301 redirection, so you better be careful while using it.
• Google mentions that "canonical" is a hint and not a directive, so they are not bound to abide by this.

For those of you using Wordpress, Drupal or Magento Joost has already created a plug in for this tag.

Labels: canonicalisation, duplicate content, Google, SEO, URL

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This morning I received an invitation from Google to attend the first ever official Google conference for webmasters. Search Masters 2009, as they have named it, will be held in Google's Bangalore office on February 28th.

I was a little surprised to receive the email at first as I had no clue about such a conference happening and was actually considering to attend the SearchCamp 2009 in Chennai over the same weekend.

It is great to see that Google taking the initiative to meet the webmaster / SEO community in India. While there has been a few other SEO conferences in India over the last few years none of them saw any official representation from Google - also in the other International conferences though Google representatives actively participate, we have not seen Google organizing a similar conference.

The agenda of the conference would include discussion on Google Webmaster central and Best practices, Custom search, Webmaster Help Forum, Building Mobile friendly websites, Google analytics and website optimizer. Google's Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik would also be there for an interactive session.

Indian Search Masters 2009 is the first official conference organized by Google ( the mail says so). Also, the invitation letter clearly mentions that the invitation is non-transferable and if you would like to nominate anyone else for attending the conference, it will be up to Google's discretion to decide if that person is to be invited or not. The fact that Google has been selective in extending the invitation is really appreciated because my previous experience in some of the Search conferences in India shows that often the crowd is too big for any productive discussion and at times there is a huge difference between the knowledge level of the attendees that makes it boring for some.

*A small edit: This doesn't seem to be the first one, though the invitation said "we would like to invite you to the first official conference for webmasters organized by Google." it seems Google has done similar Search Master Conference in Brazil and Mexico last year.

Labels: Google, india, Search Conference, Search Masters 2009

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Yes, as surprising it might sound, Google.co.jp has got a Page Rank penalty for buying links. The page rank of Google.co.jp has gone down from 9 to 5.

Though Google has a major share in the search market across the world, in some of the countries like Russia, Korea, Japan the local search engines like Yandex, Naver etc are still having a dominant presence.

To fight back Yahoo's predominance in the Japan market Google team was trying hard and recently they got Cyberbuzz to get Pay per Post advertisement for their recently introduced top searches option ( in widget form) that they have introduced specifically for Google.co.jp.

A recent Twit from Matt Cutts confirms that the PageRank of Google.co.jp has been reduced and it is likely to be so for some time now.



Google Japan might have been penalized for pay per post activity but this controversy would now probably get them enough link and popularity than they might be getting through those paid posts ;)

Labels: Google.co.jp, paid links, pay per post, Penalty

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Corporates using social media to bolster their sales and brand names is no longer a big news. There are many who have been using various social media platforms to their benefit. Dell has been known to use the new media with proficiency and they have done it once again with Twitter.

Dell is offering exclusive discounts to its Twitter followers. It was reported by Internetews in December that Dell generated more than $1 million in revenue over the last one and half years through sales alert via Twitter.

All who follows Dell on Twitter gets an alert every time there is a discounted sale at the company' Home Outlet Store. They can either purchase the product themselves or forward the offer to friends and family.

To take its Twitter campaign to the next level Dell announces discount for the 17,727 people who follow @DellOutlet. It would provide product links and when the users click the link it takes them to the specific product page on Dell.com

All these 17,727 people receive the marketing message from Dell on regular basis. While many corporates has been trying to explore Twitter as a marketing channel Dell is probably the most successful one. Also the irony is , Twitter is yet to find a way in which they can monetize the platform whereas others are getting their fortune out of it.

Labels: case study, Dell, social media campaign, Twitter

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Google has launched its "The Internet Bus" project in India to educate offline population about the benefit of Internet. As the name suggests this is a bus with Internet connection and fitted with multiple computers. This bus would travel through various cities in India where the offline mass would have a chance to experience Internet by themselves and realize the benefits of using Internet.

The bus has started from Chennai on 3rd of February and would travel through various towns and cities in Tamilnadu throughout the month of February. The final destination would be Tuticorin on February 27th.



Google provides detailed information about Google Bus at http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/internetbus/ and they would be updating the route further. There is also an Orkut community being set up to spread the word.

This is an extremely good step taken by Google and while it is beneficial for those uninitiated to the world of Internet, it would also help in spreading the Google brand name further even to the typically offline mass ( which is a substantial figure considering Indian population) and the more people know about Internet and start using it, they can definitely not keep away from Google. In other words this philanthropic activity of Google would actually be effective for them in building more users for themselves.

Labels: Google, india, Internet Bus

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Google has been offering AJAX based results through API for a long time now but recently it has been observed that in some countries Google has rolled out its AJAX based interface in main Google search as well. While this is still used selectively only in certain regions it can very well be the way Google decides to work in future.

The main difference between the traditional Google search engine result pages and the new AJAX based pages is in the URL structure. A normal Google page looks like

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

The AJAX version would look like..

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=google+ajax&fp=0k_STq_SEOg

Now what is the big difference between these two ?

Note the “#” in the second URL. On any Google query the URL string carries the query value under the “q” parameter and we can easily understand the keyword ( and at times other information as well) by looking at “?hl=en&q=google+ajax&btnG=Google+Search&meta=” part. In the new URL the query part is placed after the #.

All the web analytics packages that are used today, may it be a server based log analyzer or a JavaScript based analytics package; they work by parsing the data passed by browsers through the URL. So a traditional Google search URL could have been easily parsed to understand what was the keyword searched for, the language, the page in which the result was displayed and similar data. However, with this new URL structure, browsers would not be able to pass the value displayed after the” #” mark, as a result all your Google referrals would show up as just Google.com and there would be no way for your analytics package to tell you which keyword sent you the visitor and what was the keyword position in search results page.

It is probably not a small tweak in the JavaScript that would allow the analytics to track this data and the possibilities are that if Google decides to roll this out as a regular feature globally it would actually mean the end of all the existing analytics packages. Even Google analytics is not able to handle these URLs at present and shows the referrers as Google.com/referrer. However, it is a possibility that Google might do necessary modification to Google Analytics to track such AJAX based results before they role out the new feature globally. In such case it would spell the doom for all the existing analytics package and would actually create a virtual monopoly for Google analytics.

What are your thoughts on this?

Labels: AJAX, Google, Google analytics, Web analytics

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Since the launch of SearchWiki, there has been a lot of speculation going on in the search industry if the data collected from Search Wiki is going to influence the Google organic results. There has even been articles on the web that has expressed apprehensions about the end of SEO with the increasing influence of personalized search and Search Wiki.

Initially I did write an article on Search Wiki and also mentioned that there is a possibility of Google using the data for ranking the organic results. However, on second thought it seems pretty impractical at least at this stage. Here are my reasons why currently there would not be any influence of Search Wiki on Google Algo.

Before including any factor in the ranking algorithm, I am sure Google analyses the data in details and also tests it throughly under various conditions. At present Google would not even have enough data on Search wiki that they can use as a test sample and therefore there is no question about them including Search wiki data i the ranking algorithm at present.

We all know that Google's algorithm has a component on user feedack and Google gets enough data on click through rate, bounce rate and analytics that helps them to successfully use this as an algorithmic factor. In future there is a possibility that Google might use the Search Wiki data in this user feedback component of their algorithm, however, that would again depend on how popular Search Wiki gets and the number of people actively using Search wiki. Apparently it seems that Search wiki has created a buzz only among the community of web and Internet professionals. How far will be its acceptance among common people ? Also, I presume this data would only be usable if it correlates with the data collected from the other sources and there is a broad trend that can be applied across all keywords.

So what we are essentially saying here is that SearchWiki data is not a factor in Google's present algorithm and the chancec of it being a influencing factor in Google's algo is relatively low. If at all it has any influence that would be minimal as there would already be other more reliable data of similar nature to supplement it. Also, if we are sticking to the basic SEO principles and creating websites that are more focussed on users you are sure to score high on this user feedack component of Google's algo and SearchWiki would not really be something that you will need to be concerned with.

Labels: algorithm, Google, Google SearchWiki, ranking factors

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I wrote a post on how to SEO a blogger blog and my web analytic tells me that it is one of the most popular posts on my blog. Also through the comments on that post and the mails that I have received in reference to that post I have been asked a lot about WordPress blogs and how to do SEO for Wordpress blogs. There are various WP Plug ins that are extremely useful and makes it really easy to SEO any WordPress blog without much of technical complexity. While any SEO enthusiast WP blogger can easily find about the plugins here are few tips that would also come handy for anyone looking to optimize their WordPress Blog.

So here are some tips to SEO your WordPress Blog..

a) SEO Friendly Permalinks - One of the key steps in optimizing your WP Blog. the default structure of Wordpress Blog URLs are like www.yourblog.com/?p=5. You need to change it to a SEO friendly format. Go to Options > Permalinks. Chose the option "Custom" and put in /%category%/%postname%/ Your URL structure becomes www.yourblog.com/category/this-is-your-post-title . Isn't that simple ?

b) Page Title Optimization - As with any other websites Page Title also plays a key role when you SEO a blog. The default page Title structure for a WordPress Blog is "Blog Title - Page Title". While this is not bad, it can be much better if you have it as "Page Title - Blog Title". As your post specific keywords are expected to be in your Post title it becomes really helpful for SEO.

c) Optimize Category Names - This is a very simple thing that we often miss. In point (a) we have mentioned about including the category name in URL, so using keyword rich category names can actually enrich your URL. For example, in this SEO Blog if I am to create an category for Misc. for all my non-SEO posts instead of naming it as Misc or Miscellaneous I might as well call it Non-SEO or Other Than SEO.

d) Make your Post Titles Click-able - Yes, some Wordpress themes comes with this customization, some of them don't . It is pretty easy to do and is really helpful in making your WordPress blog SEO friendly. In your main template and the Page template you should be able to find the code

[h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

Replace this with

[h2][a href="[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

* note: We have used [] instead of <> used in the actual code.

e) Related Posts - Yes, here you would need a plug in and trust me the Word Press Related Posts plug in is a gem. Just install it and insert the code snippet in a suitable location ( generally after the post), you are done ! Related posts would start showing up against each post, this would not just enhance your internal site navigation but also add value for your visitors as they would be able to find al posts about the same topic in one place.

f) Site Map - Again it is advisable you use a Sitemap Plug in. If your theme is well planned and you have a few back links to your WordPress Blog, you should not have trouble getting your posts crawled, however, having a sitemap would cause no harm. Try using the WordPress Google Site Map Generator Plug in.

g) Content - This is probably the most important factor in optimizing your blog. Post regulalrly and ensure that you are sneaking in your targeted keywords within your posts wherever applicable. make sure your post titles have your keywords. Having said all that, a word of caution - Do not over do. If you would like read Characteristics of good website content writing.

There can be much more that you can do to SEO your WordPress Blog, however, if you are following the above tips you should be pretty set. Just build a few good back links and your Wordpress blog should be well optimized.

In case you have any other SEO tips that you think would help optimizing a WordPress blog please feel free to add in comments.

Labels: Blog, Blogger, SEO, SEO Tips, WordPress, WP

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