I’m sure the majority of web users only use the web, image, or map search functions of Google. However there are many tools that Google offers which aren’t necessarily advertised on the main site, or even in their ‘more Google products’. They’re usually found in the Google Labs and one of these tools in particular can help one in the beginning phases of an SEO upgrade – and it’s called Google Trends.

Google Trends allows you to view search trends by multiple terms and compare them. This allows you to see where the trends lie for your specific industry in terms of keywords and what your target market is looking for. This tool can be very powerful depending on what you use it for. It can allow you to see seasonal trends and steady traffic patterns that you otherwise may have missed. For example, you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think may have seasonal trends:

It’s also possible to browse trends based on calendar dates rather than searching for them by viewing the Hot Trends. For example, by browsing the top 100 hot trends of November 4th, 2008 it’s obvious you’ll see the majority of results circle around the 44th presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain.

It is important to remember that just because a certain search term is a ‘hot trend’ does not mean that you should put into your keywords or website content if it doesn’t fit with your topic. If it isn’t already apparent to why it’s a bad idea to incorporate content that doesn’t fit your topic or audience I strongly suggest you revert back to either my post on copywriting for SEO or Jess’ post on building the right audience.

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In the past, several search engine optimizers have heavily discouraged fancy navigation menu systems; rather recommending using search engine friendly menus based on HTML and styled with CSS. Up until now the primary language understood by search engines has been HTML; however Google has unleashed the ability for its spiders to crawl and read JavaScript.

This means that the navigation on your website can now have dropdowns and flashy effects without sacrificing SEO. A good example of this is the Monitronics website. About a month ago they launched a new site built with DotNetNuke and the Solpart version 1.7.2 menu system. DotNetNuke’s Solpart menu system relies on JavaScript to run. In the past, this would have been strongly discouraged as with scripting disabled no menu items are visible, which equals bad for SEO. However, now that Google has spidered the new JavaScript menus they will appear in the Google cache and count toward SEO value for the site.

Yahoo’s cache is a little different in this case though. The main menu text is visible however without the drop downs. Yahoo has successfully cached the text rendered by the JavaScript but failed to read the JavaScript code itself therefore failing to spider the drop down menus and the menu links.

Even though Google spiders can now index JavaScript, this level of accomplishment is yet to be seen for Yahoo. Considering Google is Yahoo’s closest competitor I don’t see this being the case for long. In July 2006 a study showed that 43.7% of web users search with Google versus Yahoo at 28.8% of web users. This means we aren’t home free with JavaScript and SEO quite yet but it does mean a very large step in the right direction and good start to 2009.

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The following is a post I wrote for Citrus SEO on blogging for businesses.

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A featured post from the Citrus SEO blog by Netgenetix Media:

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Writing content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However the Google engine weighs link-based popularity much heavier than just keywords repeated within your content. Many website owners who write their own content try to add in words that don’t necessarily need to be there – hoping they’ll help themselves in the optimization department.

Really, if you think logically about this, even if you fill your content with keywords for your website, once your users get there they won’t want to return because they don’t feel like they’re getting the information they need, at the rate they want. They’d have to dig through mountains of misplaced keywords and unnecessary content – which I can guarantee you very few readers will actually do.

Generating content for your users will keep them coming back and will generate more traffic (and more popularity!) since your users will spread the word about your useful and to-the-point information. This talk of spreading the word is usually done through links, whether through emails, blogs, or websites.

In some ways back links can be categorized as a black hat SEO technique and they come in the form of link baiting (through social content websites) and buying links from other websites. The key is genuine, sweat-of-the-brow, organic, back links which are given by choice.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll let Google tell you.

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