Interview with Adam Lasnik - Part 2

Key Takeaways

hi everyone today we have with us adam lasnick google search evangelist adam is dedicated to building strong relationships between google and our webmasters he's here with us to attend india search conference welcome adam thank you good to be here so this is your first time visiting india yeah how's your experience been so far so it's it's been a whirlwind i've already gotten to see hyderabad and of course now i'm in bangalore and heading off next to a chennai and as you mentioned it is my first time in india ever i've had the chance to travel to a lot of different places and i think one thing that particularly stands out here is uh it's hard to describe it's like the energy uh whether i'm on the road or in the the google office and you it's you can almost feel it it's sort of an excitement in the expression in the overall mood of of the area and then there's some other really sort of neat noticeable things for me i've actually gotten to try real authentic india indian food for the first time sometimes to the shock of my palettes and i've of course gotten to do a few touristy things like going to charminar and oh i also i was very excited to go to a school and get to talk to some young kids so it's been a great experience so far great i'm glad you enjoyed it so let's talk about these conferences as we know google attends a lot of these conferences you also travel to a lot of these conferences so uh could you tell us how important these conferences are and what folks who come to these conferences could possibly take away yeah sure um i think what's really exciting is that uh to my knowledge this is the first time uh the search quality team in india is putting on a conference and taking active part in the conference and i think it's a great opportunity and bound to be a great experience of course i know that folks on the team here have already taken part in a number of things online such as our user group uh helping out with a blog and so on and i think that's really really important very valuable but there's something in person that you just you can't get online and i think there are things you can learn when you're talking to people face to face you can see the body language you can see the expressions it's not just a matter of folks from search quality sharing information with webmasters in india and beyond but also i think of equal importance learning from the webmasters what what people what site owners in india want to see what kind of new tools new features what information and having that kind of conversation face to face i think there's there's no substitute so i'm not only looking forward to tomorrow but also to see more of this in the future as well so um let's move on to some webmastery here uh so let's say i'm a beginner webmaster so what tips do you have to offer from google so as a beginner webmaster i think uh certainly by far the most important thing to keep in mind is a content content content and specifically we're talking about original and compelling content because without that you lack the foundation of a site that is going to do well with users and and do well in google frankly from there though there are a couple specific tips that can really help you to get that content highlighted in google search results one of them people may not realize and that's actually to optimize each page title that's not only good to help google understand what the page is about but it's also what's showing up on the search listings so when people are looking for say a specific restaurant menu a lunch menu if they see just the restaurant name in that title that's going to be less compelling than for instance restaurant name lunch menu or restaurant name serving the greater bangalore area menu for lunch the latter example here gives people a really strong idea of what they're going to get when they click on that link there's some other things that you can do as well not just with title tags but also with alt tags with images for instance oftentimes you may have a photography site or you may have lots of charts and graphs and helping google understand and also users understand what those are about can be very helpful and you can do that by using the alt text to say chart demonstrating an increase in revenue twice two times the last year etc and the last thing i would recommend is to certainly take advantage of a lot of the information and resources in webmaster central but i guess we can probably talk about more of that as we go sure so i'll get a little more specific here let's talk about small businesses say i'm a small business and i want to set up this website quickly build and optimize it to improve my revenue and traffic how would you suggest i go about doing that ah for a small business okay then there are a couple other things you really want to keep in mind if we assume for instance that you're a small business that has say a local presence within india in a community or in a state in india there is one thing you definitely don't want to overlook and that is our free local business center the initials for that are lbc with that you can actually fill out a form i think even call a number in india and submit your listing for lbc that says what your business is your phone number your address and a few other small things and from there you are much more likely to show up in google local search and in fact in google search on the whole another thing you can do on the same lines in terms of getting local and attracting local traffic local traffic and local interest would be to include your company's actual mailing address or even phone number on the bottom of the page that's not only good for users to help them understand ah this is really a local company that i can do business with but it also helps google understand aha if someone is searching for uh restaurants in hyderabad then this may be a good site to show so now let's move on to websites targeting the content on say a specific region so how can a webmaster associate the content of his site to a particular geographic region how can he make sure that he's able to reach out to that audience uh yeah geographic targeting and of course that's a particular interest for small businesses that are really looking to focus on uh traffic and an audience that is local or it may even be traffic or audience that's in a particular country that's not where you are but is where you're selling your product or where you uh where you want to to get that traffic from so for instance let's say you have a com you can actually use google's geo-targeting tool within webmaster tools to say okay this is a dot-com but it's really intended for people in india so you can actually select a pull-down menu that tells google okay here's a hint when you're uncertain which users to show this for and which sets of search results give this site a little preference for people coming from india ips but even before you use that tool there are actually a couple of things to keep in mind there's two things in particular that google uses as hints to help us determine where a website is focused regionally one is the tld so for instance if you really do want to focus on india having that dot i n can be a helpful hint for google and then there is one other factor to keep in mind and that is the location of your hosting so if you really do want to target those folks in india then it's probably helpful to you to actually use a local hosting company in india now if you don't have that if you can't get one or more of those things let's say you have a great hosting package somewhere in the united states don't despair using the other options that i've described can also give google those good hints on where you want your audience to be coming from