Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
for Indian Web sites
The question many indian web site owners often ask is that “Is
SEO really necessary for my website?”. Before answering that
question we got to understand some basic realities about indian web
sites. These are the type of sites which require SEO :-
1) Websites catering to Foreign Audience :- These typically
include online shopping sites which cater to the rich Non resident
Indian (NRI) Community settled abroad. These sites are generally
e-stores selling anything from Bindis to ethnic Indian garments.
Most of these web sites know the importance of SEO. They get major
traffic to their site through Search engine Marketing strategies.
2) Websites selling Indian products as Gift items :- These
typically include the ubiquitous gifting sites. Most of these sites
also cater to the NRI community as they send gifts to their local
relatives. The strong point of these sites is their local presence
which is tied up with a Courier company to enable quick delivery.
3) Corporate sites :- These include the Indian corporate
sector. They are not so dependent on the search engine traffic for
their existence. But these sites are more concerned about their
Corporate image and their online Branding. Search engines provide
a perfect solution for them to Brand their websites to the searching
public.
But is SEO a qualified way to target traffic ?
In answer to that question let us look at other traditional methods
of advertisement.
1) Television :- This is one of the most popular medimum
of advertisement along with Print Media. But the question which
needs to be asked is “Is it targetted form of advertisement?”.
The answer varies. If your customer base is house wives then you
can easily target any soap operas and pass along your message to
those audience. But if you want to do any more targetting of advertisement
than it is not possible.
2) Print Media :- This is also very similar to Television.
Here you can target various magazines for a particular group. But
again the message cannot be reached spanning multiple gepgraphic
lcations.
3) Sponsoring Events :- In this form of advertisement there
are sponsors that take over an event and shell out enough cash to
organize the event. In turn they generate a curiosity for their
product or service.
Now compare that with Search engines. A person is typing in a query
to search either for a product or service. He knows exactly what
he wants and hence the audience here cannot be any more targetted.
Here again if we are doing Pay per click we can even choose which
geographic location we want to serve up the ads. There are so many
tools available that you can totally customize the way in which
you can market either your products or services.
What works for Indian Clients?
As we have mentioned there are three main types of Search engine
Marketing strategies :-
1) Organic search engine ranking :- This is the free results
section of Search engines. The rankings over here are constantly
changing according to the Algorithms of the search engines. The
rankings generally change every month. A Good example for such an
engine would be Google.
2) Paid Inclusion :- In these type of search engines you
generally have to pay money to get your site indexed in the search
engines. There are many schemes available but the most popular is
a fixed rate which the search engines charge on an annual basis
per url. The urls are crawled regularly and search results can be
seen as quickly as within a week. A Good example of Paid Inclusion
engine would be Inktomi.
3) Pay Per click :- This is an advertisement service which
allows you to display your results as ”Advertisements”
side to the search results. You will be charged everytime a customer
clicks on your site in the advertisements. One of the popular Pay
per click engine is “Google Adwords”.
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