Posting this just now because I didn’t have time to finish it last night. Before I knew it, the conference was coming to a close and I had to spend the last hour talking to people and taking as much photos as I can. :)

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For the Site Clinic, the panel consists of Hans Koch, Damien Kelly, and Mike Villar.

A Nestle representative stood up and bravely volunteered their (fun, funky, youthful and colorful) Nescafe 3-in-1 campaign site.

Immediately, of course, Hans and Damien fired away with their SEO diagnosis, mostly targeting on-page elements. While the site is very engaging to the eyes, most specially to the youth (which is their target market anyway), the site is also very problematic if you’re gonna look at it through the Search Engine eyes.

Some on-page considerations:

1. Meta tags (titles, keywords, and descriptions) are not optimized. Damien suggests to make the title and description more search-engine friendly. Hans shows how the site shows up in the SERPs — not only does it lack meta descriptions, the only content that’s visible in the first page are the footer items, hence, those are the ones that show up in the SERPs.

2. The page *seriously* lacks text content and keywords. Nuf said.

3. The page is flash-based and overly-graphical. It’s too heavy, and it takes a lot of time to load. Damien suggests to have an html version of the site (both for those who don’t know how to navigate through the flash version, and for SEO purposes).

4. SEO and User Experience wise, navigation is problematic. Mikey suggests to have the “Quick Jump” drop down menu moved up to the top right corner of the page.

5. Source code is too heavy (too many lines). Viewing the source code, Hans suggests to take off several lines of javascript off the code and save it as another file. This way, the SE-readable content is right up at the beginning of the page.

Other considerations:

Maia, our resident Web Analytics Guru, who’s sitting beside me, immediately mentions to me that according to WASP (Web Analytics Solutino Profiler), the site does not have any form of web analytics tool or tracker. If they really want to understand and analyze their market/audience, web analytics is *very* important.

Mikey asks the Nestle representative what the site’s objective is. He mentions that their campaign is to market the Nescafe 3-in-1 to the youth, hence marketing their product to Friendster, and coming up with this portal.

There is much to say about the site, but first of all, they have to re-establish their objectives — Do they want to target online gamers? Friendster users? Young people looking for band gigs? If their objective is to be seen in the search engines, there’s a lot to be worked on. They have to identify their keywords, optimize their page, and most especially, put up a web analytics tracker.

But if they simply want a portal (or a landing page), they shouldn’t expect more than the traffic they’re getting from their friendster app page.

Once again we are reminded how uneducated local companies are about internet marketing and the opportunities that come with it. Soon enough, I’d expect to see Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Globe, and all other big names/leaders in the local industries to start investing on in-house Internet Marketing departments in their own offices.

Nestle has started acknowledging the fact that there is an online market to be reached, and I applaud them for the effort and the conceptualization of this Alien campaign, even more, for immersing into the most pinoy-congested social network, Friendster. How to maximize on this opportunity is the next step to be explored. They’re definitely on the right track.

The panel took in two more sites for the Site Clinic, but the conference was coming to a close, and I became too focused on taking pictures, which I’ll be uploading soon. So yeah.

Need help, Nescafe? You know what to do. Hee. :)