On the speaker’s list were Mr. Abhishek Rungta, Mr. Arun Agarwal, Vikas Kedia ( Video Conf.), Aji Isac and myself.

For me the evening offered much more that I expected. Besides getting a chance to interact in real with some of my long time virtual friends, I met with one of my childhood friends with whom I have lost contact for few years now. We didn’t have any clue that both of us have a common link – “blogging” – and that would bring us together after so many years.

The Bloggers Meet was formally opened with a cake cutting ceremony by the youngest blogger in Kolkata, Soham.

The introductory elevator pitch round was an opportunity for bloggers to promote their products / blogs and was ushered in with much enthusiasm. While none of them were “elevator pitch” in the true sense of the word no one seemed to complain and it set the mood of the evening pretty well.

The first presentation was by Mr. Abhishek Rungta about how blogs can contribute to the topline of your business and it as pretty well structured and presented with equal ease. It was nice to meet Mr. Rungta after our first interaction almost 2.5 years back and I was pleasantly surprised to see that he still remembers me.

Aji’s had some really good tips in his presentation and some wonderful statistics that were insightful and helped the audience understand what could be done further to enhance their blogs.

Vikas Kedia came on Video conference and had a discussion on whether we should allow search engines to index our content. While it is a much debatable topic, given the monopoly Google has established I couldn’t see any possibility of webmasters charging a premium from search engines to index their content.

Arun Agarwal was next in line with his presentation on Reputation management. This was probably the most exhaustive presentation of the evening and the audience received it well. While it was a little too long , the content was worth the time.

My presentation planned to cover three different yet related points – objectives of blogging, how to get traffic and how to make money from blogs. You can check the presentation below. Am also trying to get the video of the session and would post it here if I manage to get it.

Kolkata Bloggers Meet was a result of effort by a group of fellow bloggers from Kolkata ( Kamanashish, Saikat, Anirudh and Shimul ) and we cannot thank them enough for the initiative. Besides, it was really generous on Mr. Rungta’s part to offer a sponsorship on behalf of IndusNet Technologies – even the best of intentions doesn’t stand without proper financial support.

Photos from Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009 – http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=128692&id=129612851702&ref=nf

The post Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009 – Review appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Finally we are having a Blogger’s Meet in Kolkata on 8th of August, 2009. It is definitely a great initiative by a bunch of guys out there. While being in Hyderabad doesn’t allow me to be a part of the organizing team, I will make myself available in Kolkata on 8th and will be speaking there.

From the list of bloggers that have already enrolled it seems we are going to have an interesting crowd from diverse field and that is one reason I am not so keen on taking up a SEO related topic. May be I will try to address some common concerns for all bloggers like generating traffic and money making from blogs.

Abhishek Rungta and Aji Issac would also be speaking in the meet.

The post Kolkata Blogger Meet 2009 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

a) The Googlers repeatedly stated the importance of joining and participating the webmaster communities, particularly Google Webmaster Help Forum and the Official Google webmaster community in Orkut. Also encouraged the use of Google Webmaster Central and the data available there.

b) If you are buying a old domain, it is important to verify & check links through Webmaster Central. If you see any possible issues it is important to file a reconsideration request.

c) In answer to one of the question Adam Lasnic clearly agrees that Google analytics data is used to judge the quality of the website.

d) In another conversation it comes up that while the directory structure of a website doesn’t really matter to Google, they definitely look at how many clicks it takes to reach a page to judge the importance of a page in a website.

e) In answer to a qustion about Link building, Adam stated, “Do not worry too much about relevancy” – thrashing the well established concept of having back links from related websites. He mentioned it is good if you have related back links but even non related links are good as long as they are natural and comes from good quality websites.

f) Table based HTML Vs. CSS layout – Adam stated clearly the Google have no preference as such and it can crawl almost all possible HTML structures unless the internal navigation structure is not horribly bad or the pages are protected by robots.txt

g) Also mentioned Validation is great for usability but not a factor that Google considers for ranking.

h) If a site that we link to changes hand and the content on that website undergoes complete change and becomes a part of bad neighborhood – is that a risk for our website ? In answer to this Adam mentions that Google doesn’t look at each link individually, rather it looks at overall trends and aggregates. Google understands legacy so change in nature of link due to change of website ownership would not affect any website.

f) Is there a possibility of duplicate content penalty if your content is copied by other websites ? Adam said that Googlr has got the technology to identify original source of content and this type of situations typically does not initiate any penalty. Google however, does not look at the time of publication because Google might index content in a copied website before it indexes the original source.

In case of synidcated content like article directories as long as there is a “Follow” link to the original source Google is able to identify the original source of the content and credit it for the same.

g) Microformats – Google does not understand Microformats at present but they are working on it and in near future as Microformats become more popular they should be able to index them.

h) Adam repeatedly stressed on the use of sitemaps both HTML and XML to make it easier for Google bot to index all the pages. He clearly mentioned that this would not help with organic rankings though.

i) For multimedia content like video, images and audio files it is important to add context to it by putting good content around them. This helps search engines to judge the multimedia elements

j) For Geo targeting, Google uses the TLD, physical location of server, information obtained through Geo targeting tool in GWT as well as the language used.

k) It is important to test websites in browsers with JavaScript turned off. That gives a clear idea of what Google bot gets to see while crawling the page.

Besides the above points there were discussion on Google Custom Search Engine where Dr. Rajat Mukherjee explained the concept of custom search engine and how this can be used.

Ankit Gupta gave a nice presentation on the Mobile friendly websites – why they are needed, wat are the things to keep in mind while building websites for mobile users, the challenges etc. I will make another post covering these points soon.

Deepak Jain had a talk on Google Analytics & website optimizer. He explained how these tools work and the advantages of using them. He also focused on the metrics that should be tracked and how the data can be used to improve conversion.

Some Photos From Google Search Masters 2009

Google Search Masters 2009 Conference

In discussion with Adam Lasnic

Google Goodies

Some more photos from Google Search Masters 2009

The post Google Search Masters Conference Updates appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.