Google Website Trends

Google have just released website trends - similar to their keyword trends product.

Google Website Trends, like Alexa tracks traffic trends for specific websites and allows you to compare one site against another. It breaks this traffic down by country (so you can see geographically where most of the traffic comes from), and also lists several other sites those users have visited and other search terms they have entered.

From a keyword analysis point of view, it’s another tool we can use to help build our keyword strategy - if you identify the top websites in your niche, running a website trends analysis will let you see their major geographical markets, other sites their visitors use (which you can then look at further), and related search data. It probably won’t be a major part of your analysis toolkit, but it can definitely help to fill in some gaps.

I do have a few problems with it though… curiously, Google have made a few choices that seem a little odd. Unlike their keyword trend data where they cryptically include a ’search volume index’ that allows data to be compared without giving away any actual search data (which they could obviously report accurately if they wanted to), with website trends they attempt to rank sites via ‘daily unique visitors’ - a very specific indicator for which they have incomplete data and must guess. Considering that Google make most of their money via advertising, reporting (inaccurately) on other websites traffic figures could potentially constitute a conflict of interest. Fortunately they seem to over-estimate if anything (from the few larger sites I’ve checked that report some basic traffic data), but a drastic under-estimation could potentially damage a competitors ability to attract advertisers.

The other issue is that the only way sites can exclude themselves from the trends data is to use their robots.txt file to completely exclude their site from all Google indexing (meaning they won’t appear in the Google search results)… this doesn’t apply to Google itself though as the majority of its web properties are excluded from the trends data (no google.com, youtube.com etc.).

Overall it’s something interesting to add to your toolkit, more from a competitor analysis view than a keyword point of view, but you may still pick up on a couple of ideas that you can research further in other tools.

Google Health Provides some New Keyword Research Data

If you’re interested in anything to do with the health sector (and judging by adwords prices there are some very profitable niches in there), then Google Health, which has just been launched to the public can give you a quick little boost to your keyword research.

Google have put together an extensive amount of reference […] Continue Reading…

EntreCard gets some New Features and a Free eBook

I’ve only just started using EntreCard… it’s kinda intriguing, a lot of people like it, it has the ability to both send traffic and network with other bloggers - so from that perspective it’s worth giving it a run I reckon. You can see the EntreCard banner in the sidebar of this site - […] Continue Reading…

Social Media Keyword Research: Twist

I’m spending a lot of time on Twitter lately, I don’t think there is any better way to keep up with breaking topics and to see what types of things everyone else is currently talking about. If you want to be part of active conversations on the web, and make sure you blog posts […] Continue Reading…

Marketing and SEO Tips for Bloggers

Just a quick post to let you know about a new blog I started about a week ago.

Marketing-SEO.com is about Marketing and SEO tips for Bloggers - essentially it is an outlet for my thoughts and ideas on marketing and promiting a blog. While KeywordSEM.com will continue to focus on Keyword Analysis principles, Marketing-SEO.com […] Continue Reading…

Keyword Intent - Web Search Classification Study

Penn State University have just released a paper that studies the keyword intent of web searches over a sample of 1.5 million searches.

You can read the entire research paper “Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries” (PDF), but here’s a quick summary:

Queries were divided (programmatically) into three categories: Informational, Navigational, Transactional.
The […] Continue Reading…

Keyword Resarch Tool Review: Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is probably the most comprehensive keyword research tool available on the market today, so I thought I’d put together a review and show you my thoughts on where I think it shines or struggles against other keyword analysis tools that are on the market.

1. The Interface

Keyword Discovery’s interface is clean and simple, some menu […] Continue Reading…

Keyword Research Update and Ramblings

The KeywordSEM.com blog has been live for about six weeks now, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the new subscribers that have climbed on board during that time - without a readership, a blog is nothing, your support is greatly appreciated.

This week saw the conclusion to my six part […] Continue Reading…

Another ProBlogger Twitter Link Fest

Problogger Darren Rowse ran another little Twitter Experiment today, this time asking his network to send him a link to an article they posted during March 2008 that they considered to have the best title.
The article that I tweeted was 5 Keyword research tips to finding the questions your readers want answered - in […] Continue Reading…

Putting your Keyword Research Plan into Practice

This is the sixth and final part of my series on comprehensive keyword research for bloggers and niche marketers, part 1 deals with defining your keyword research goals, in today’s article we’re going to look at what it takes to bring all your keyword analysis together and make it into a useful plan for […] Continue Reading…