There was a SEO and SEM conference “SearchCamp 2009” in Chennai on Feb 28-Mar 01 2009 at Tidel Park, arranged by Knowledge Foundations. As I am one among who attended the conference I would like to share my views on the happened there. The attendees includes entrepreneur, marketing people, paid search managers, SEM Agency people, In House SEO, In House SEM, Online Media planners etc.
Day 1
How SEO/SEM is Doing Well in the Recession Time: The session given by Mr. Vivek Bhargav from Communicate2 and he made his presence among the visitors with his wonderful speech. He finished his fantastic speech with a note saying “See the opportunity in crisis!!”
Keyword Research Tools and Techniques: This was handled by Mr. Abdul from Convonix. This session was a helpful one for new comer in the industry. The session created some heated debate and some extend quite interesting too.
E-Commerce SEO: This session was by Mr. Srikar Nagubandi from US. His session was effective too. He made the session classified into on-page, off-page and technical and explained in terms of social media as well. (social bookmark and twitter based tools etc)
Webanalytics – What Next? Mr. Trinadh – a Web Strategy consultant from CTS made the session very effective and created an awareness among the visitors about the web analytics industry. And its a point to mention here people from web analytics field also were present in the conference other than SEO / SEM. Those who don’t know about Mr. Trinadth, he is country head for “Web Analytics Association India”
Usability and SEO: This session was handled by Mr. Vishal Sampat CEO of Convonix. He explained in detail about the usability and how to avoid common errors web masters / developers / designers makes with a website.
Panel Discussion: A last event for day one. The panel includes Mr. Akbar Lalani, Mr. Kapil of om Logic and Mr. Arun of Sify. The hot topic discussed was which is better organic search or paid search. But I feel the discussion diverted to some extend to In house SEO/ SEM or Agency SEO/SEM.
Day 2:
Advanced SEO: This session was hosted by Mr. Stephen Spence president and CEO of NetConcepts. He joined us from US. The session was pretty good. He talked about some advanced search operators to find supplemental index results in Google, pagerank sculpting and folksonomy. The saddest part was the connection got interrupted and visitors were looking at empty screen most of the time.
Right Marketing Mix during Recession: This was handled by Me. Kalaivani and a simple but effective presentation.
Q&A with Adam Lasnik: Questions raised all over from and Adam handled them quite easily I must say. I liked the question about Wikipedia ranking higher for many search terms and is Google getting money for that? 🙂 In fact Adam greatly explained to the question. (Wiki keep their website simple, rich content, keep flash and JavaScript away and above all user likes wiki and SEO’s not!)
Local SEO and Listings: Suresh Kumar handled this session and provided some useful tips. (Call to action in title) Also he took a sample website from attendees side and made a site clinic as well. Pretty impressive.
Tracking Paid Search with Google Analytics: Ms. Reema Thakur presented the session and provided the details on customer behavior, product preference and keyword effectiveness etc. But I feel she could have had her presentation topic saying “Tracking conversion through Google Analyics” than “Tracking Paid Search with Google Analytics”. Her insight details on transactional funnel analysis and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) Metrics are impression though.
Tit Bit: In mean time we had some lightning talk sessions by the attendees and at the end of the day one people are highly energized to go to Falor Farms(Beach House) for “Power Networking”. And a quick note should be added about Mr. Kiruba of Knowledge Foundation who made the entire conference so lively and very successful.
Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.
da best. Keep it going! Thank you