Reporting from SearchCamp India, Chennai, March 1
Day 1 highlights are here
Day 2 began pretty much the same way i.e, horribly late which skewed the schedule for the rest of the day.
Sessions:
“SEO Basics – Things You Must Know”…scheduled to start at 9 am!. did not happen at all..i guess we really didn’t need to know after all.
“Advanced Techniques in SEO – Stephan Spencer”…for me personally this was the one session that rose from the ashes and redeemed the event to a great extent. Not that the session wasn’t fraught with issues, started really late, laptop for webex meeting unavailable and for the latter part of the presentation we stared at a blank screen. But Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts who is releasing a book titled the same as the session was concise and articulate and also offered some really useful tips and tricks for SE optimizers (bumping your competition off the search results!..that was really news for me)..a screencast is available here we think
“The right kind of Marketing Mix during Recession – Kalaivani Sadagopan”…Kalaivani used real world examples from her company Caratlane (offers diamonds and diamond jewellery online) and made a pretty strong case for effective and adaptive marketing tactics during a recession. Very well done!
The above two sessions extended well into the scheduled tea break and so the organizers must have decided to pull the plug on the next session which was “Effective PPC Campaigns & Landing Pages” – Palani Balasubramanian, and went straight into the “Q&A Session with Adam Lasnik (Google).
Search marketers in India seem to go into a tizzy whenever faced with the opportunity of meeting somebody from the mothership. When Adam let it drop that he worked a few feet away from Matt Cutts..i’m sure i heard a collective gasp from the audience. He was assaulted with a barrage of questions and some of them were “refereshingly blunt” which he had been warned to expect, but he handled all of them including the “bouncers” with consummate ease (the only slip, if you can call it that, was when he reffered to Google Local as Google Loco! Don’t fret Adam it could even be a new product!!) and left every body wanting more. This was evident from the fact that most people surrounded him before, during and after lunch that followed the Q&A session. Although he gamefully stayed till the very end of the day i have a sneaky feeling that he must have been relieved when it was finally over 🙂 .
“Using Analytics to track Paid Search Metrics – Reema Thakur”…The ‘first Indian GAAC’, a fact that Trinadh had gushed about in the earlier session.  Using a client case study, Reema offered useful insights into using Google Analytics effectively to analyze and improve paid search campaigns. Very well done again and the ignorance in the audience was very palpable 🙂  one note though..selling should always be subtle..
“Local Search – Suresh Babu”…Using local search to gain a competitive advantage. Useful tips.
and… curtains!
Hopefully the organizers will improve upon their failings and have a better version in Bangalore the next time around.
Special mention: Kiruba Shankar artfully engaged the audience and the speakers with his one liners and breezy comebacks..one shudders to think what the event would have been like without his presence..kudos!
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you got some value out of my session.
That isn’t the screencast of that presentation, unfortunately! There is a bit of overlap, but not that much. But it is a very good screencast, and actually goes more in-depth.
The title of the book I’m co-authoring with Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola and Eric Enge is “The Art of SEO”, so it doesn’t match the session title.
So are you doing outsourced SEO for US based firms?
Cheers,
Stephan
Thanks Stephan for the clarification. We most certainly derived great benefit from your session.
The screencast like you say is really in-depth and a great resource.
We wish you the best for your book
Yes we are doing outsourced SEO activities for firms in the US and other English language countries.
-Siby