Inside Searchcamp.in

Last weekend, I attended Searchcamp.in conference in Tidel park, Chennai along with Sudaakeran. Having wasted the last 2-3 weekends, I was initially planning for a trek with my colleagues but that did not materialize and hence ended up in the conference. Though I got very basic knowledge of how Search Engine works and how people try to do SEO based on my day to day work @Globalscholar, I never got chance to know about it in detail. Because of my lack of interest, I just did implementation without understanding the details in depth.

Searchcamp.in was a great eye opener for me to understand the scope of things that are covered in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I never thought people spend so much time on SEM as well. I was always of the opinion that people need to spend lot of time and energy to get higher ranking in search engine and that’s what matters. The kind of research people do for SEM, regarding the key words, bounce rate, conversion and other analytics gave a different perspective.

 Also, there were number of companies that were floated and thriving on this alone. The Search Camp community has people from varied background - Hardcore technologist to Pure marketing personnel to media managers to content creators to local businesses. This shows that it is not purely technical and involves lot of methodical planning and creativity to get good ranking in search engines. 

 Some of the trivias :

• Search engine considers how long for the future the domain is purchased
  
• Number of Subdomains affect the ranking as well.
  
• Tag clouds help in improving the ranking.
  
• Web page loading time and usability affects the ranking.
  
• URL Cannibilization  - Duplicate contents from the same domain fighting for the ranking.
  

Good Things :

• Collaborative. Discussion was given importance which made knowledge sharing easy.
  
• Ample space for networking
  
• Diverse gang. Got input from various angles. Business team to content creators to SEO experts to Developers.
  
• High energy shown by people like Kiruba Shankar and Adam Lasnik.
  
• Again thanks to Kiruba, very friendly atmosphere and small games.
  

 Things that could have been done better :

• Very high level introduction of SEO for newbie’s on the first day. This was scheduled for second day but did not happen.
  
• 60% of the speakers were really good and had good knowledge about their talks. Rest of them were not so authoritative and were struggling to answer. They were also just reading from the presentation without adding any useful points.
  
• Technical glitches around Stephen Spencer. This one was really a bad experience because his talk gave lot of important points and things to do research. Thanks to Webex or the wifi network, presentations were not streamed properly. Little bit of work beforehand would have saved this.
  
• Audio quality. Mics were getting disfunctional now and then, which made concentration lot difficult.
  

Overall, Thanks to Searchcamp.in for giving me a chance to learn. It sowed me the seed to learn more things about SEO and I am defly going to try out new things with it and keep you guys posted. This is the first step. :-)

Back 2 Blogging

Ppl, I am going to start blogging again very soon. Going to start with a conference I attended last weekend. Keep watching the space.