Google Webmaster Conference Mumbai 2019 was organized on 19^th July, Friday at JW Marriott, Mumbai. The day to ask Google advocates all your queries that affected your SEO results, what type of content does it like and what not! A day filled with the knowledge for beginner & advanced level of webmasters and SEO personnel who get to know about many things Google considers to give the best result! This was a women-only conference by Google. The reason was, as per Google data, women are more active searchers around the globe compared to men! No wonder!! Being a female working with a team of only girls at iVIPANAN, I got a chance to visit Mumbai to attend this conference.    

Key Takeaways of Google Webmaster Conference Mumbai 2019

After the wonderfully warm welcome by team Google in the rainy weather of Mumbai, Syed Malik Mairaj (Google Search Outreach Lead – India and South Asia) shared the event agenda and introduction to the other speakers. This was a conference kick-start and then after till late evening, I have learned a lot! What’s up Search by Syed Malik Mairaj This session was covered by Syed in which he explained the whole process of how search takes place and also shared the updates on the latest search trends. According to him, every time you search, there are millions of web pages with helpful information comes in the result. We have to understand how Google figures out which results to show, how It organizes information about web pages in the library called – Search Index. Google provides results in multiple formats. Hence to get appeared in search results, we’ve to learn to optimize each format as per Google guidelines.

• Google is emphasizing the use of Structure Data. They are coming up with many new markups.
• Optimize your content for  “How to” questions, structure FAQs accordingly for your website.
• If your website has any forum site, implement “Q & A schema” for the same.
• Always have the habit to apply tags to the images of the website so that Google can decide the image category
• Optimize for Mobile-First Indexing as they are considering mobile search as the primary search
• & desktop as a secondary one.
• Always have the habit of giving tags to the Images
• Always AMPfied your website
• Optimize your product or service for “near me”
• Google is announcing the Opt-In Program wherein they are going to let HD images appear on SERP.
• Use Chrome developer tools such as  Lighthouse Chrome developer tools to check for the site performance

Google Search Console by Himani Dudhat Himani Dudhat from team Google took a session on Google Search Console. If you are optimizing, you need something that shows the performance of your website. Google Search Console works as a mirror for your website.

• Always add your site to Search Console.
• Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly, and regularly monitor your site’s mobile usability.
• Learn about various search result features for your site, such as AMP and structured-data-implemented features, such as recipes, job postings, and event postings.
• Understand how to get Google to crawl the right pages using sitemaps, and how and when to use noindex and robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling pages or resources.
• Learn how to design multilingual or multinational sites for users accessing your site in other languages or from other countries.
• Keep an eye on coverage report & troubleshoot all the errors that you find.

SEO best practices by  Arunddhati Deshpande  Ms Arunddhati Deshpande from Team Google shared useful hacks that each SEO professional need to implement as a best practice. She shared 6 most important things as below: Quality Content Quality of the content that provides actual value to the user is something google loves the most, So before even starting the optimization, Always decide your topic very wisely. Search Friendly  Make it appear to the search by optimizing as per Google guidelines. Mobile Friendly  The way the mobile era is growing, creating your site & content  mobile-friendly is crucial Fast Knowledge is shared within a fraction of seconds. Ensure your site loading speed is good. If it’s not compared to your industry standards, you need to work on it. Secure It is a must! No matter your site giant  E-Commerce website or static informative website, Security must be implemented. Structured Always use structured data markup on for the relevant content to get results in rich snippets in SERP. What she asked to check for on-page optimization,

• Proper Domain Name
• Meta Title
• Meta Description & Keywords
• Content Relevancy & Readability
• Use bullets for website content
• SSL
• Robots & Sitemap
• Page speed
• Structure Data
• 301 redirection
• lang tag
• Remove errors from the google search console
• Always use Inline CSS & make less use of javascript

As a takeaway, Ask yourself the questions before publishing the article

• Would you trust the questions asked in the articles?
• Is this article written by the expert?
• Does this article provide original information, reporting and analysis?
• Was this article edited or does it appear sloppy or hasty reporting, original research or original analysis?
• So after this much mind feeding, we went for lunch which was followed by networking & knowledge sharing. After the delightful lunch & dessert, we got chance for one on one interaction with Gary Illyes (Google Search Strategist at Zurich, Switzerland). He tried to talk in “Hinglish” which sound quite funny! He is quite a knowledgeable person I found there! The next in the list was Sandhya Guntreddy. Bing SEO by Sandhya Guntreddy
• One of the surprising things was, they also allocated a slot on Bing Webmaster which was taken by the technical program manager of Microsoft, Sandhya Guntreddy wherein she shared the similarity about Google & Bing search. She stated that there are many similarities between Google & Bing Signals that are being considered as a ranking factor.
  • Write high-quality content
  • Starting from the formatting tag, make proper use of it on every page  
  • Write a proper meta title & meta description.
  • Cherry on the cake : Use schema markup on your website
  • Verify your property in Bing Webmaster tool and use it regularly to monitor site performance on Big results. (Bing webmaster gives in-depth SEO report, If you haven’t used it yet, try it today!)
  • Focus on link building. Backlinks play a vital role in getting result on the 1st page.
  • Hence the above are the basic points that we have to consider while optimizing the site for SEO which is also considered by Google.

Adsense Policy by Vishal Aron Vishal Aron from the team discussed in brief about the basics of Google Adsense Policies. Few which I noted are as below: Decide the ad placements for your type of site. If you’re unsure where to place your Google AdSense ads, then you can start with these resources for best ad placements for news sites, classified sites, gaming sites, forums, blogs, sports sites, and travel sites. Another way to know what will work best for your audience is to find the most popular sites that are similar to yours and look at what they are doing. Even if they are not using.  Try Google’s recommendations for a week, then laying out your Google AdSense like other popular sites have their ads laid out for a week. See which week performs the best in earnings, and you will know what layout works best for your audience. Confirm if your ads need to be responsive. First off, you will want to look at your site on your smartphone to see how your ads look. But before doing that, you may first want to see if mobile traffic is important to your site and your AdSense earnings at all. You might find that if you optimize your ads to be mobile-friendly, you’ll make more money with AdSense across the board instead of just with desktop users. After the experts’ sessions, Gary & Syed discussed various  SEO Mythbustings, which I would like to share with you and expect your views on the same. Below are a few myths about SEO.

• Buying expired domain makes your site rank better
• Shorter domain do not necessarily rank better than longer ones
• Keywords used in the domain name makes them rank better
• Hosting on the same IP affects the ranking
• Hosting on a fast server takes care of site speed
• Google recommends responsive web design
• Responsive main domain ranks better than a mobile-friendly subdomain
• Google prefers subdomain than subdirectories
• Google uses language code to determine page language
• HTTPS is highly recommended for non-sensitive static website
• When migrating from http to https, there are no implications with respect to google search

After 10 hours of the knowledgeable day and brainstorming Q&A session, we left the conference room around 7 pm with new points to be taken care of while optimizing & what are the myths about SEO. I was fortunate to attend this conference as I was the only one coming from Surat! Digital Marketing in Surat is now growing like anything and my this experience is surely going to help our clients! SEO is no more a choice, it’s a compulsion for the organic brand visibility. Businesses can not afford to spend money all time. SEO is the investment that gives you compounding growth in a long run. Get in touch with us If you are looking for the trusted SEO agency in surat to strenghthen your brand presence on Search Engine.