Note from Ann: We a SEJ are all for knowledge exchange and therefore we encourage various SEO meetups and evens and always agree to cover them. Here’s one of the most recent SEO meetups covered by our guest author.
SEO is not always a glorious profession, it requires a great deal of motivation and interest and without it one can fail miserably. In order to stay on top and up-to-date with technologies, one should continuously participate in research, sharing experiences, attending webinars, meetups, conferences and others.
The culture of exchanging knowledge and experiences is very common in the regions like United States, UK and some other regions. I am really a fan of collective research and combined education – so I and few like-minded friends from the industry organized a small meetup where we invited other professionals from the search industry and discussed the latest trends and updates of the industry.
I was the Speaker at the First Karachi SEO Meetup and we covered the following points:
History of Search Engine:
With the undeniable fact that the terminology of SEO was first used by Bruce Clay and John Audette even before the Google came in to being, we discussed how search engines have been evolving over the time.
Search Engine Algorithms:
Although this is a complete chapter and it requires hours of conversations, we moved from the history to search engine algorithms and tried to discuss the basics of how search engine algorithms work and mentioned the few fundamental reasons why Google and other search engine change their algorithms from time to time.
This is a fact that Google tests 500 to 600 algorithm updates in a year (though not all of them are permanent) – there are a few very big and powerful updates that Google has introduced to make search results faster and more accurate.
We discussed a few powerful algorithms that Google has brought from 2009 till the latest Panda Update in 2011.
Canonical Tag:
Canonical tag was first introduced by Google and the purpose of this tag was to reduce the duplicate content issue within the website. For example, if you have two different URLs that contain the same content, the canonical tag will tell Google that one of the pages is original.
We also talked about the duplicate content between two different website and then we discussed the cross-domain canonical to reduce the duplicate content issue between the websites.
No-Follow Link Attribute:
The topic has been previously discussed by me in detail. The attribute itself is not a rocket science to anybody today but the way we discussed it was a bit different from the casual one. We actually discussed the value of no-follow tag in terms of ranking and conversions to the website.
Sentiment Analysis to Links:
Updated in 2010 this is one of the important but less discussed Google Algorithms. The purpose of this algorithm was to identify if the link within the article or post is reward to the company or a bad fame. In order to identify this, Google updated the algorithm which they named Sentiment Analysis to links.
The Big Panda Update:
The Panda is not new to anyone out there, so instead of discussing what it actually is, we tried to talk about how to recover from panda and what are the very basic strategies to follow that take the Panda away from the website.
About the Meetup:
The meetup was arranged by 3wogle IT House in their open air auditorium. They have plans to arrange these kinds of meetups on regular basis (at least once a month). They have already announced the topic for their upcoming meetup that is ‘Social Media Marketing’
Anyone interested to join the upcoming meetups can join their facebook fan page for updates.
