Why Books and Movies?

Its interesting to see that Amazon simply launched with Books and Movies as Books have always been a strength for Amazon in International Markets and they are making sure to play by their strengths. Along with Kindle, Books category makes a lot more sense for them and its a great way to start with a really big catalogue right away. Smart move Indeed! And by giving away FREE e-books every fortnight, they are making sure that bargain hungry Indian crowd get a taste of e-books and what Kindle device is all about. I am sure this promotion would help them once they start selling Kindle aggressively in India.

Coming Soon: Mobiles and Cameras

What really impressed me was their way of announcing their next categories to be launched which would have surely sent jitters to many e-commerce companies. They have nicely tucked it away in their navigation bar, keeping everyone on their toes and keep the excitement going. Such a simplistic design to keep your visitors aware and keep your competitors on their toes. No coming soon flashy banners!! But everyone now knows what to expect next?

Would Discounts really flow?

With Flipkart running Big Offers Day and Mobiles and Cameras websites like Tradus offering frequent  10% Off coupon codes on very low margins categories like Mobiles and Cameras, It would be very interesting to watch how Amazon launches this segment. Would they get into price game from Day 1? Or would they focus on building Customer experience and offering top quality Service? I would not be surprised to see deep discounts being offered when they launch the Mobiles and Cameras section to get the initial traction. They have already went live with Affiliate Program very soon, which clearly indicates that they are definitely going to rely on Deals and Coupons website to push those bargains to the end users.

Tapping their Organic Traffic

As one would have expected, Amazon.in is now listed on Junglee too and Any Indian visitor going to amazon.com gets a nice little alert saying “Shopping from India? Visit Amazon.in” Such a neat little way to tap to the organic traffic amazon.com drives from India. It speaks volume about the Brand Amazon. Everything is well planned out while giving the very best user experience too.

It’s indeed refreshing to see Amazon coming to India and its even more refreshing to see that they have started to do all the small things right too… They seem to have delivered books quite quickly and I believe this competition will be very healthy to the Indian e-Commerce system.

The post Amazon India Goes Live with Books and Movies. What’s Next? appeared first on Born Nerd.

SEO ofcourse have its place!

So, to be clear, I am not against Search Engine Optimization. SEO is good and is almost needed for many content focussed business. SEO articles across the web helps you make your site more accessible to Robots and also in many ways, help improve User Experience etc. Rich snippets, for example, can be so useful info for Robots as well as the visitors searching for those related keywords. Well formed page titles can quickly let a user know what the page is all about. Tags can help users/visitors see related content together and improve internal navigation and reach the correct piece of content he or she is looking for.

So why does our focus shifts only to Robots?

We all know that our ultimate aim is to get good quality visitors and they can be acquired via many other channels. If our content is really good, if our website is extremely useful, its bound to be shared and liked. And Google Robots will have to take notice of the same. All of us see Search traffic as a very significant channel and hence we try to push more. Tweaking every way, here and there, to get noticed by Google Robots. We end up forgetting that the focus has to be content and not those tweaks.

What is Search Engine Over Optimization then?

Symptoms of Search Engine over optimization would be management team, founders, non-seo team members constantly searching for keywords and tracking the Google ranking for those permutations and combinations of keywords almost once or twice every day. SEO Team recommending some urgent changes to be made because Google may seem to have changed something with their algorithm. And because some self-acclaimed SEO Expert says making some changes would significantly change page ratings with the new Blah blah Google updates.

I feel that SEOO could be a dangerous game and hurts more than anything else. It simply ends up clouding you by SEO and end up having a negative impact. “We need to have some outbound links here to some high quality pages…” Something that the user is not going to appreciate a lot.

Going into this mind frame of doing things only for Search engines and not for your users, is Search Engine Over Optimization.

Should we stop worrying about Search Results then?

I just had an amazing chat with my partner on the topic and he had one very valid argument. Would you sit back when others are doing this over optimization and getting good results? Would it make business sense to loose revenue and traffic to your competing websites, just because they are trying to understand those Google Penguin updates better? Should we not worry at all?

I would say, Yes we must definitely keep an eye on Google updates etc.. and make sure that our site is user friendly first and search engine friendly next and also ensuring that we have W3C compliant website and as per Search engine guidelines too. But we must also not forget that there are other channels to acquire customers and more importantly, serving them in the best possible way, so they definitely admire your website/brand must be the top priority and not the 20% Traffic Drop because of some Google updates. If you are doing things right, that traffic would come back.

In fact, it has been a blessing in disguise for us, as we started to correct many on-page errors, exploring offline channels for promotion among other activities. Only time will tell whether not giving much importance to Google traffic drops would hurt us more or not. But my advice would be dont Kill yourself if Google does not get it right when you the best content available. They would fix it eventually.

What are your thoughts? Is there something called too much SEO? How do you react when traffic drops? Over SEO? Share your stories with us!

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