Google Trends is one of the most underrated services offered by Google. Smart marketers have been using it to optimize their pages, get more traffic on a daily basis, and even come up with products that people want to buy. But it’s still surprising to see executives and top marketers have no clue about what Google Trends is all about. Till now, you could access Google Trends through its official page. But Google has just announced that you can now see the trends on the SERPs, as long as the keyword phrase that you are searching for is on the top 100 fastest rising terms, based on the data from GTrends. Here is what Google had to say about it:

hen you search Google.com and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, we’ll show you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information — like how popular the query is, how fast it’s rising over time, and other useful data.

I still would have wanted to see the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on GTrends’ page, but that is not a big change. The move should certainly make it easier for people to get more out of their search process. And one would hope that more people will now take advantage of Google Trends, now that the trends will be shown on the search results page.

How it works

To see the feature in action, you will have to check Google Trends and choose one of the top terms on that list. “Joe Scarborough Surgery” is a keyword phrase that is going strong as I am writing this post.

As you can see, Google Trends information shows up at the bottom of the page. While this is very interesting, I would hope for Google to show the same information when I searched for “Joe Scarborough” as well. Google has a lot of services that could provide useful information to the searchers, but not everyone is going to search for “Joe Scarborough Surgery.” I mean what are the chances. Google needs to find a way to tie the information together and provide more value to searchers per each and every search. To cut the story short, it would have been nice if Google would show people who are searching for a specific term the related trends as well. (more…)

A lot of people ask me about the tools that I use to conduct keyword research for my projects. Keyword research is the most important part of the process of any SEO project. You see, you can master all the ranking factors. You can get all the links in the world, but if you are not targeting the right keywords, you are just not getting the best out of your traffic. Many bloggers, webmasters, and small business owners tend to be cheap when it comes to keyword research tools. People don’t mind paying $30 for a business lunch but paying $30 a month for a premium keyword service suddenly becomes too much to bear. In reality, all webmasters need to take advantage of at least one premium keyword research tool if they truly want to get the best out of their SEO campaigns. With that in mind, here are 8 services that I have used and continue to use for my own SEO projects:

Keyword Discovery: has been one of the best keyword research tools around for years. The data that you can dig up by using this service can help you plan those long-term SEO projects more effectively.

WordTracker: has been around for years. It’s a great tool if you are looking to expand your keyword list and find new keywords to target on your website. Provides you with the means to expand your keyword list and find the keywords that can actually drive traffic. It does differ from KWD as far as its data source is concerned.

Wordze: one of the better “classic” keyword research tools on the market. It tells you what keywords are getting how much traffic. A great way to find those hidden gems and optimize for keywords that are not too tough to get ranked for. I personally love all the convenience of the service. It’s easy to export things and get a decent amount of research done in no time (read Wordze review).

Compete: Compete is not a cheap service by any means. It can cost you a bit of money to get your hands on all the useful information that this service can provide you with. It can tell you how long people have spent on your website, and what keywords have brought you the type of traffic you are looking for.

Keyword Country: this is one of those tools that is not getting too much attention but is very powerful. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche.

(more…)

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Google has managed to confuse and excite a lot of people around the world. The “UFO” community has used Google’s latest stunts as a sign that Google is finally disclosing the presence of flying saucers. For the rest of us, it’s been more about finding out what Google is up to rather than whether aliens are real. The first time Google pulled this stunt, I admit I was a bit surprised. It’s not everyday that you see a flying saucer abducting one of Google’s letters. It would have been a fun way to indicate that Google was changing its name, but that obviously wasn’t on the cards.

I do believe that Google is taking advantage of the whole hysteria about UFOs and aliens to generate some buzz about an upcoming event. Google may be working on a product or service and is teasing us by showing these flying saucers picking off the letters in “Google.” Maybe another clue will tell us what the name of that upcoming service is. We have also heard a lot about the HG Wells connection, but I don’t believe in coincidences. If Google had done this stunt once, I would have believed there was a connection. But Google is doing it too many times.

Now I admit that I don’t follow the UFOs or crop circles or strange topics like that. But could it be that Google is seeing a surge in the number of searches on this topic and is only adding some push behind the trend? Or maybe Google can’t stop teasing us searchers and officially make people forget about Bing? Microsoft can spend all the money in the world pushing Bing, but Google is going to get a lot of free buzz by pushing some controversial topic. Whatever the case, let’s hope Google doesn’t unveil green men on its next logo.

A lot of people have asked me in the past to provide them with some foolproof methods to get ranked high on search engines such as Google. A lot of people tell you that all you have to do is have a great title tag, and you are all set. I don’t dispute the fact that your title tag is your best bet in getting ranked higher on Google. But in most competitive markets, you are going to have to work on your link building and social media campaigns to increase your incoming links and climb your way to the top of the search engines. But if you are in an emerging market, there are plenty of simple ways that you can get your pages to the top of the engines. And best of all, all you have to do is conduct proper keyword research to find keywords you can get ranked for. You won’t have to beg others to link to you, and you won’t even have to give something away out of your pocket. Now you may want to try other tactics to maximize your search engine traffic, but the below methods are the easiest ways to get started with the process:

• EzineArticles: everybody has heard of EzineArticles. It’s the best article directory out there, and you’d be surprised how easily you can get ranked for some highly competitive terms by writing a few articles for EzineArticles. Your title does matter a lot here, so don’t ignore it.
• Hubpages: hub pages are great to get ranked for those long-tail keywords. Your hub-page can show up in the first couple of pages of Google easily as long as you choose the right keywords.
• Clipmarks: a wonderful service that gets ranked high on the SERPs as well. Many have used Clipmarks to increase their presence on search engines, and you can too. Just have to be a bit creative.
• YouTube: having your own YouTube channel is the best way to dominate the SERPs. The videos are the future and many search engines are integrating videos into search results. The way to go is to optimize your video page for your top keyword terms. Don’t forget proper tagging and titles for each video.
• Twitter: having a Twitter username with your core keyword can pay big time on search engines. Unfortunately, there are a lot of spammers out there who use the same approach but don’t provide any value to the community. So please don’t use this approach to spam Twitter.
• Facebook Page: creating and optimizing your page for the search engines can pay big time in the long run. It’s much easier getting indexed and ranked with the help of Facebook than without it.

There you have it. 6 specific ways that you can enhance your presence on the SERPs. There are plenty of other tactics that one should use, but these are a good start, and you don’t have to be a SEO genius to get them done.

Unless you haven’t paid attention to the world of search engines for months, you have probably heard of Microsoft Bing. Microsoft’s latest attempt to finally challenge Google in the search engine game. And by that, it is destined to complicate the game which we call search engine optimization. When Bing and Yahoo! join in the upcoming months, they are going to become the sole main challenger to Google, and if you are a marketer who makes a living out of search engine optimization, you are going to have to figure out how to show up on the first page of Bing for fairly generic terms. You can still dominate the long-tail market but getting ranked for highly competitive terms can be a challenge.

Danny Sullivan put it best when he talked about the differences between Google’s and Bing’s algorithms:

You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing

You may not see too many differences in results as far as highly competitive terms are concerned, but there are major differences for those keywords in the middle of the spectrum. Google does pay more attention to links whereas Bing pays more attention to content and tags. Both search engines still highly value having the exact keyword in a URL. But that’s never going to change.

Is Bing worth going after? I am not so sure. With the field of social media exploding the way it is, you are better off focusing on a long-term approach than something as fleeting as the Bing’s rankings. The best strategy to have is to figure out the common areas between Bing and Google algorithm and try to optimize in a way that strikes the right balance for both engines. But I have to choose two places to drive traffic to my website, they’d be Twitter and Google. Let’s not forget about Facebook either. (more…)