Google Insights – Useful for SEO Analysis

wilfully Knowing what keywords to go after with SEO can be difficult. Some words may have a lot of competition. Some words may not be used frequently in searches by your target market. Luckily, Google has provided us with a useful tool for analyzing what keywords to target for your website.

buy prednisone for dogs online Google Insights is a tool developed by Google. It is a pretty simple to use website. You add search terms and then choose history specifics. In turn, when you click search, it sends you results of the historical trends of these search terms.

For example, which word is more frequently search, “lawyer” or “attorney”? Here is a Google Insights historical comparison of the two words. As you can see attorney has consistently been the more frequently searched word on Google.

But what to do with these numbers? This is where it can be tricky. You also have to think about how competitive the words you want to use are on search engines. This means, which search term are you going to be able to crack into the search results easier? This analysis can be done by searching google for the terms you want to go after and thinking about how big the sites you first find are. If you find a bunch of sites with high Alexa ratings (high traffic), odds are you are not going to be able to compete.

As you can see, SEO is complicated. I find it enjoyable to analyze. It’s like its own economic game where you have to consider all the angles. In fact, thats how I view most of web development. Just a game with a lot of angles.

Using Filters with Google Mail

If you are a gmail user, one extremely useful add-on in gmail is something called filters. Filters allow you to apply labels to specific mail, creating a folder-like organizing effect. For example, if you wanted to make every message sent from my domain (@gpmwebsolutions.com) be flagged with a specific label/folder, you have the ability to do this.

Setting up filters is pretty straightforward. Here is a tutorial explaining filters made by gmail’s help team. Tutorial on Creating Filters in Gmail.

Filters are useful for not only organizing but also filtering out spam. I recently moved my mailbox all to one place for 3 different email addresses. During the process of the switch, I ended up having 4000 messages marked as unread in my mailbox. Using filters, I was able to organize this mailbox in what one would think would take days in a couple hours. This is because you can flag specific email addresses to forward straight to a filter folder and skip the inbox. I found myself doing this for emails sent from Amazon, Best Buy, Ebay, Paypal, etc.

One of the services we offer is a full Google Apps set up for your business, just like this software available at https://www.paystubcreator.net/. This comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and more. Filters is just one useful example of how using this service will benefit the organizational strength of your company. Contact us today at info@gpmwebsolutions.com or by calling 314-397-2751 to discuss these options.

New Google Algorithm – What it Means for Customers

I have been getting questions from customers about Google’s recent algorithm change and how it will affect their SEO. Last week, they made a drastic change to the way they gather search results, affecting 12% of Google’s results. (CNN’s article on Googles Algorithm Change)

How does this affect you if you are a potential or current customer?

According to everything about this big change, it is to make search results fair and to hurt websites known as “content farms”. The definition of a content farm website according to Macmillan Dictionary is “a website that publishes huge volumes of low-quality content”. (Macmillan Dictionary Definition of Content Farm)

The way I advise SEO is contrary to content farming. We attack SEO with two methods. One being on site keywords that we handle. The second being to blog frequently or occasionaly, depending on what the customer sees fit. The first insures we do nothing to hurt search results. The latter is for getting Google and other search engines to notice that it is not a static site and is constantly changing, increasing the crawls to your site. We have other ideas on SEO, like generating more links to your site, that take extra time and effort to do effectively.

So for you, the customer, this change should not affect you. According to Google’s purpose, it should actually help you. This is because your site will have rich content and not be flagged as a content farm in any way. When it comes to SEO, it is a game, but the search engines always make changes to make it a fair game. Our advice is to do what Google tells you to do and play fair. Google has all the control and realizing this is an important step to doing SEO in an effecient manner.

Smart Google Searches

One of the best things on the Internet, that everyone already knows about, is Google. Google makes it so you easily find information that is already available on the Internet. This is perfect for development. Here is an example.

A couple weeks ago, I was asked about how we could add a chat room to a website and if it would be difficult. I knew that the chat rooms you see on sites were mostly in Flash, which I knew minimal about, but after 5 minutes of research, I replied “Yes”. Why?

Chat rooms have been around forever. From my development experience, I know that for stuff on the Internet that has been around for a while, there is a 95% chance a developer put a free solution of it out there somewhere. The reason why would be a good lesson for an intro to microeconomics class.

Initially someone made the first ever chat room. This was initially expensive for the consumer since there was no competition. Then competition joins because there are plenty of developers out there who can figure out what that first person made. This drives the price down. On the web, the price keeps getting driven down until it is free (a lot of the time). This is because a developer realizes he can make the tool for free and then make money off of other areas like monetizing the traffic they would get from giving away a useful thing for free.

So that answers why I can most likely answer yes, but it does not answer why I that was my answer. The answer for that is Google. Smart Google searching can answer whether something has been already developed for free rather quickly.

But what should I search for? The first search you probably think to do is the wrong one. “Free Chat Rooms” popped into my head. This just gave me a list of a bunch of free chat rooms to sign up for and use (not what I wanted). The best thing about Google is if your initial search fails, just dust yourself off and try again.

Here are two easy tips for smart Google searching.

1. It should be something detailed but concise. For this example, I knew what language I wanted to develop in which was PHP. This was a good starting point on a good search. So I tried “Free PHP Chat Code”. Sure enough the first thing that pops up is something called “PHP Free Chat”, exactly what I wanted.
2. Just type the complete question. I do this a lot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I typed in for this search “How to add a chat room to my website”. Sure enough there are some results that should start leading me down the right direction from this search as well.

My method is usually to see if I can come up with a detailed enough search that gives me exactly what I am looking for and if that fails, then trying the type in the full question method. I do this because as you can see from the above example, doing the first method tends to give you exactly what you are looking for while the other tends to start leading you in the right direction.

Either way, Google is awesome for this. I still think they are creepily similar to “Big Brother” from 1984 with how much information they have on me as a person. That’s a different discussion though.