OME Community Meetup - My Second Experience

Every time when I miss to attend OME Community Meetup, there was always some personal stuff for excuse. But I was damn sure about not to miss December Meetup, besides all the excuses I had to give. Although all the preparations being done beforehand to attend the Meetup, I rushed only to see the main session of the event to be ended. However, as always I also enjoyed the Network session and Tips sharing session.

Aashish Malve’s Presentation had good insights about Online Sales during Holiday Seasons, tips, suggestions etc., Thanks to Aashish for sharing the presentation by mail. It was good to be connected to industry experts of diversified knowledge.

It also allowed me to reconnect with Suresh, Shiva Purohith, Shyam, Raghava, Ranjan and many more. I could also see new emerging entrepreneurs who were very keen to learn Internet Marketing and students who were interested to take internships in companies on ‘Online Marketing’.

Many a times I wonder how people do such thorough research & analysis on a topic, when I hear someone like Raghava talking about Twitter optimization and Shyam on wordpress blog post rankings. Great tips!

I see OME Community as a place where you can share knowledge on this very distinct subject - Search Engine Marketing.

Looking forward to the next Meetup

My OMEBang Experience and the Power Tip

OMEBang Online Marketing Enthusiast Community Bangalore is a group of young passionate digital marketers who are experts in diversified industry including Social Media, Search Engine marketing, Affiliate marketing, Web Analytics, Paid marketing and much more. These bunch of people have same quest and desire - share and grow.

I am glad that I got an opportunity to attend the September OMEBang event at IIM Bangalore. The one thing that had driven me to attend was 'Jayashree' giving a talk on Online marketing best practices. I jump with joy and get inspired when I see women in Marketing community evolving. I can see decent count of women members too - entrepreneurs, web analysts, social media experts. AT PEACE!

Jayashree gave a neat presentation on "Online marketing best practices". She delivered it wonderfully with smiles in between. Interrupts couldn't actually 'interrupt' her smile.

This event also gave an opportunity to get introduced to peers in Digital Marketing field.

There was one session 'Power Tip' where anyone can share their own successful online marketing tips. I gave a simple tip that turned to be the best power tip of the event :) and that was sweet 'ahaa' moment for me.

This was the first event where I divulged my own identity 'Bhuvaneswari' instead of my alias Deepthi.

Here is the Power Tip:

Convert the Sitelinks titles as 'Call to Action' items and enhance UX:
The links shown below some sites in Google search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site.
These sitelinks titles are driven from anchor text or alt text (of a linked image that can act as anchor text) used for your site's internal links.

Make Best Use of Sitelinks:
Tweaking anchor text or linked image alt text of sitelinks pages with descriptive, eye catching titles can act as 'Call to Action' items.

Say for example, if you run a hospital website and one of your sitelinks title is seen as 'Appointments', try figuring out anchor text of all internal links to reach the appointment page and rewrite them as "Call 91-44-24914737" which will eventually appear as your sitelinks titles.

This serves 2 purposes:

• It satisfies displaying your 'Call to Action' item right in the SERPs
• It saves searchers time in navigating your website looking for your contact number.

SideWiki: There are instances that the sitelinks titles can be generated from alt text of linked images or even from your "noscript" tag links. In any case, make best use of it and apply any magic to it to work wonders.

Thank You OMEBang!

Evidence for Long Tail Search being Dead : Google Instant changes Search Trends

Google Instant kills Long Tail search. Yes, you heard it right. Lately, many of SEO gurus were complaining about long tail search being killed by this so called Google Instant.

But, what's new in me saying that again. I have something beyond just the NEWS, I have got the evidence. When I tracked my Google Analytics, I can easily figure-out how many of the long tail searches that were yielding me decent hits has gone down to ZERO. JUST ZERO, which in turn reduced my overall traffic by 15% (huge loss). Below shown is just one among them.



What Google Instant mean for public?

It means FAST for any common searcher. It may be fascinating for them, as anything that happens fast really pulls your eyes. For them, it seems like Google understands their intent. But, they can't seem to understand how it kills their thinking ability or distracts them or been pushed to receive ONLY what Google offers. It simply looks adorable for them.

So, what should a SEO expert do ?

Don't SEO for Long Tail key phrase: Years back, SEO experts advised on not to target just the highly competetive generic key phrases as there are people in the world who search for specifc questions or for a specific problem. But now, everyone have to run for those highly competetive generic ones again. Fight for it..

I agree, the traffic couldn't vanish and go away - my lost traffic could be gained traffic for others- - for websites that tops for popular key phrases. But I am on the loser side. 

SideWiki: What does Long Tail mean? "Matt Bailey" of Search Engine Guide explains it "The Long Tail is used to describe the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a website is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited by owners of the website or in Layman's terms it is just "Non-Popular keywords".

Why could my Facebook Page not Public: Dig What? E1

Recently I came across a simple, yet silly problem which had every chance to create big impact. When I tried clicking one of our client's FaceBook page that was showing up in Google Search Results landed me to Facebook homepage - which means that page is turned to be not-to-public view. And when I tried to find the root-cause, found that it is all because of the Age Restrictions set to "People above 17+" (that was reset recently unknowingly by one of the page admins).

This age restricted Facebook page will be shown to viewers' whose identity is assured to be above 17 yrs i.e., only if you are logged in and if you stated your age us above 17 yrs - OR otherwise you will be landing to Facebook homepage.

AddOn: The other chance for your FB page being going non-public suddenly could be setting the Published option to "Unpublished".

So what impact could it have created?

- lose all potential traffic from Google and so lose 'Fans' who are not logged in.

- get de-indexed by Google eventually - lose a listing in SERPs for business name search.

- losing the chance to introduce the page to non-facebook viewers.

Dig What? E1 Lesson:

However, I couldn't think of this Age Restriction setting could be the cause, when I first traced the non-public view. I was looking for some major pitfall that could be lying behind this - and this insight did give me a newer perseverance

"When you are given with a problem, look into every single bit of information, elements in front of you - small or big - the solution can be behind anything that you wouldn't have thought off"

PS: BTW, I have to explain what does this Dig What? E1 mean? - I am planning to dig problems that I come across in my everyday professional life and try to share them. So this is my Dig What? Edition 1 . Watch this space to get the latest editions.

Naihaa goes Social in Facebook & Twitter - Does it Really?

In the recent edition of Ananda Vikatan (Tamil Monthly Magazine), I got to see a fabulous advertisement from Naihaa on the backside of the cover page - being in SEO web promotion and social media industry, I was pulled just to the bottom of the page. 

Wow! Naihaa is being SOCIAL! great news! That triggered me to still dig in what is Naihaa into? Did they make best use of their Social space? how well has it made its SOCIAL impact etc.,

Let me dig...

My first focus was for Facebook, as Facebook is the place that I think every business in this world should have their identity marked - atleast until anyother giant like Facebook evolves. Facebook Page is a good selling point for any business that likes to go social and comparatively it performs better than Facebook profile or groups. 

Two identities could be confusing:

When I searched for Naihaa in Facebook, I got two official results for Naihaa

-> profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001158177545

-> Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/Naihaaretail

pretty confusing.. The presence of Naihaa with 2 different identities can confuse consumers/users.

Promote Facebook Page rather than profile:

As FaceBook page has more advantages over the profile (flexible to add applications, multiple admis etc.,), it would be better to pull all profile friends to Facebook Page and maintain the page as their official social space and promote that identity. To take this point further, I noticed in the official website of Naihaa http://www.naihaa.com/ ,  Facebook button links to the profile identity - promoting both the identities can dilute the promotional values. Being consistent and promoting FaceBook Page should yield much better credibility.

Also, in the Naihaa website, the Facebook & Twitter button doesn't standout nor it is placed in a prominent way.

Google hasn't indexed this page, as there were no external web links mentioning about this page  - worse, the official website itself doesn't have a link to FB page.

Naihaa Facebook Page Analysis: What does the Naihaa Page lacks?

• The 'About Us' column wasn't used.
• I could only see text allover the Wall posts which is not so engaging. They can add store events, popular products, their ads 'behind the scene' photos - or anything visually appealing, as photos attract more than text. And videos could impress consumers to large extent.
• The 'Info' box is not well used - doesn't include address, company overview, or mission info.
• Naihaa has missed to take this page as an opportunity to express the humanity of their business.
• The most important is - Naihaa didn't integrate promotional valued FBML application.FBML page can engage visitors and having best 'Call to Action' items in it can perform better. I like the Basics Life FBML http://www.facebook.com/BasicsLifeIndia?v=app_10467688569 - what an engaging presentation!

World is revolving with social today and getting social with 'Word of Mouth' reviews/promotions through social space is what consumers look for before any purchase - Naihaa should MAKE BEST USE of Facebook Page to achieve it.

Being in competitive Retail industry, using Social Medium should be beneficial. 

Will dig their Twitter and SEO in my next post. 

Google Search Within a Site – an advanced search feature in main search

Google Search within a website – This feature recently introduced by Google seems to help anyone new to sea engines.

This introduction makes us realize Google always keeps watching user trends – the way people search the net. Google has found that many searchers first search for the website name and then move on to a more refined search. Say if you wanted to search for YouTube video upload info, you can first search YouTube in Google search box which would give you something like this

Which you can further refine by searching upload videos in the site search box

Oh. Yes you are right. It is just one of the features you can see in Google advanced search. Google helps searchers to have these kinds of refined searches in an easier way.

Google Social Graph API – Know your Online Connections

Google next API release is quite interesting. Social Graph API will be able to collect information on public connections between people. Google says it doesn’t show any of your private data. So how is it going to be helpful for public and for developers?

For public – to know your public friend relationship/connections with other people appearing public

For developers - you can get information to provide your users advanced features like "add friends" functionality.