Product Management Insight

Online Shopping and Web Analytics are still in their nascent state in India. A term like online marketing is quite uncommon here as majority of the population still tends to buy stuff from small retail stores. This has been the trend in India since the advent of Internet and online shopping was never given a lot of attention here. But as the status of living has been improving, people are becoming more aware of Internet. Some reasons for Online Shopping not being popular in India are:

1) There aren’t many famous shopping sites in India. The only one I know of that is famous is ebay.in formally baazee.com. (I might be wrong here but this my own opinion.)
2) Internet has never been treated as a shopping medium here as most of the Television commercials and shopping banners in the cities always encourage people to buy stuff from the Retail Stores.
3) Majority of the population still use cash as the major payment medium and Credit Cards are just recently being used by more and more people.
4) People feel hesitant to give their credit card information online due to fear of someone stealing their information online. This is a tendency in all of us but it’s only when we are aware of things like SSL and Verisign that we start trusting the Internet more.
5) Most of the people don’t have Internet at home so they tend to go to cyber cafes/Internet cafes where their information is more susceptible.
6) Slow Internet connection speed available to consumers. The fastest connection speed available to consumers is 2.5 MBps.

I will now write about my opinion on the future of Web Analytics in India. Since the time I have arrived in India after my project in United States, I have been looking at the Web Analytics job market here. I wasn’t disappointed at all after looking at the job profiles companies have to offer here. Majority of the jobs are in SEO, PPC and SEM but there is a small percentage of jobs in hardcore Web Analytics. US Companies in India are the first ones to have a Web Analytics department so that they can get some Analytics related work done from here. Many Indian companies too are opening up a Web Analytics department. So as far as the Web Analytics job market is concerned, India still has good positions but they are limited and will increase with time. Regarding the Internet usage, I have noticed that classified websites like craigslist.com are not yet popular here. Classifieds are something that can drive huge traffic but in India people still use the newspaper/radio as a medium for buying stuff or selling something. That culture is yet to creep in the Indian society but it will happen very soon.

I read an interesting post in Yahoo WA group regarding WebAnalytics not being accurate in India and China and wanted to add my own feedback on the Indian perspective.
It is true to some extent that people do tend to scramble on 1 computer but that is more prevalent in rural areas but not in metros like Mumbai and New Delhi. If talking in terms of business value, I would say people in urban India would always be more interested in buying something online rather than people in rural India. So if you want to measure the users in India, do so in the metropolitans rather than the small towns as in urban India there more chances to expand your business quickly. Again, this will change gradually once the standard of living changes and more people use their own computers. Currently only 5 % of the Indian population is using the Internet actively (Courtesy: http://www.internetworldstats.com) and still this number is in comparison to other major countries. It is inaccurate to say that Web Analytics can never be successful in India based on mere facts. As the number of Internet users increase, there will be more awareness and hopefully more business revenue. I hope you like this post and please feel free to add your comments.

As a SEO expert, your job and goal is to push your website on the top of Google’s rankings without crossing the line. No one can assure you that your site will end up on the first page when someone searches for a keyword. The first objective of a SEO expert should be to add relevant keywords in the Meta keyword list pertaining to his business. So every time you add new keywords in your Meta Keywords list, you wish that Google will cache/index your page immediately but it’s not an easy process. I have tried this before while optimizing a new Site and it took 2 months before that page was indexed.
Here are the important things I learned from that experience:
1. Content of your website should be relevant and present in abundance on the homepage as well as inner domain pages.
2. Other sites linking to your website is an important point. The more links other websites provide to your pages, the better chances you have to increase your ranking.
3. The page name is an important point. Usually we tend to ignore the page name. Search Engines do index pages based in the page name. For e.g. http://imilap.com/Indian-dating-Sites.asp. The other important tags on the page are the description, title and keywords.
4. Never try to bombard your keywords in the Meta Keyword tag as it only decreases your chances for your page to be index.

Here is a link to a website that will explain my last point in more detail: http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html. Enter your URL name and this will give you an idea about what you can do to enhance the tags on your page. These are a few tips which might improve your website's performance.
I will continue to write more about Website/Search Engine Optimization in my future posts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always fun and challenging. For starters it is always good to use free SEO tools before they become competent. I would like to share with you some of these free tools on SEO. I am going to share free tools with you that I came across as these will give you a background on where to start. I started learning SEO using a tool called Overture. This tool is a part of Yahoo and is available on the Internet at http://inventory.overture.com. It will tell you what keywords are being searched most on Yahoo based on a month to month basis. You would have to start off by entering a keyword to find related searches. For e.g. If you enter the word ‘insurance’, it would show you all keywords related to insurance with their number of searches. This is extremely useful in case of optimizing an insurance website. Look at the screenshot below from http://inventory.overture.com for the results when I did a search on the keyword ‘insurance’.


Note: This tool will only show you the top 100 searched keywords.

The next tool I used can be found at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. This tool is quite similar to the above tool but it harnesses the technology of Google and Yahoo. This tool reports 100 related keywords in the basic version but you can search up to 10000 keywords if you decide to go for the premium edition. So after you have added the keywords to the Meta tags of your Website using these tools, you can check your keyword ranking here: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports. You can start doing this after 2-3 weeks of adding these keywords to your page. This will help you determine where your keyword ranks among all the major Search Engines. This is really helpful to be at the top of your game. Below is a screenshot.


Courtesy: www.imilap.com.
Finally I would not encourage unethical practices that would improve your rankings on Major Search Engines which might include flooding your meta tags with keywords or adding extra links on your page.
Hope you like this post. I will keep you updated with cool tips and information.