Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords:

Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don’t know which flavors to serve, or suppose you’re responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file.

How can you use this data to build your business? Read more here

Yes your monthly search engine ranking report currently rank in all major search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN, but where does your traffic comes from? Is it from other site? Perhaps in a paid versus organic search? What about RSS feeds / e-mail / affiliates?

Measuring what sources are driving the highest quantity and quality visits to your site is one of the fundamentally most important (and easiest!) things a web analyst can do.

Your traffic sources report usually doesn’t look much different than this:

Then if you’re really lucky you get a slick visual summary of that data in the form of a pie chart!

Here are some useful tips I’ve found for really getting insight out of your traffic sources reporting :

• Decide on your sources

• Set up tracking on your sources

• Report and find those insights!

• Go ask for that raise!

Learn more about these practical and powerful tips. See how it was presented in a way which provides insight and analysis. Read more –>

Search Engine Optimizer Aaron Wall put up an extensive, multi-angled analysis of the worth of a top Google ranking.

Google Ranking and Pagerank are probably the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient.

Many companies are taking a much more serious look at Search Engine Optimization as an effective growth technique for their websites. But after investing in an SEO exercise, how will you determine if your efforts paid off? Yes, you’ve done a good job of picking a few metrics that allows you to measure your success in driving traffic to the site organically but what you’re not measuring is what the traffic does.

[via brucelay] Time to kick off the Search Analytics track here at eMetrics. Brian Klais (Netconcepts) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite) will be taking charge of this one with Mike Grehan and his famous stick moderating.

Essential KPIs for Search Engine Ranking Optimization:

1. Brand to Non-Brand Ratio

2. Unique Pages

3. Yielding Pages

4. Phrases per Page

5. Visitors per Page

6. Page Placement

7. Engine Yield Rate

8. Natural Search Sales

9. Brand Reach

Brian thinks it’s a strategy worth experimenting with. Vanessa Fox is in the audience and advises everyone to go read our interview with her from last week where she talks in depth about PageRank sculpting.

SEO expert colleague Nima Asar Haghighi (check out his blog) have been trying to determine what are the Key Performance Indicators for measuring Search Engine Optimization. Also, a top secret tip from Vanessa Fox that you should definitely have a peek at, a few new ones that you can choose to add to your SEO dashboard! Six Questions With Vanessa Fox.

The Website Optimizer Blog Team have also launched The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog to accompany the product.

Also announced by the Google Analytics Blog is that Urchin has graduated out of beta too. Urchin is similar to Google Analytics – it allows you to report on your website traffic – except it needs to be hosted on your own servers rather than Google’s.

Website Optimizer’s automated testing makes it easy to fix and deploy compelling landing pages. It also allows you to test changes in the website content of your pages in order to determine what will be most effective in getting conversions rate. You choose what parts of a page you’d like to test — headline, image, promo text – and they’ll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. These concepts include diagnosing problematic pages and improving them so that spiders and robots can easily crawl the site that eventually get them on top in all major search engine ranking.

A common question always asked by newbie SEO’s. My answer is: It depends on the competitiveness of the keywords you target. e.g you target”example SEO keyword” on my experience it only takes a month maximum to ranking on Search Engines.

For me, if you’re passionate about your work, you will succeed. Things won’t always be smooth, but you’ll have the built-in motivation to keep working hard. Without passion, you’ll need a heap of luck.

On the other hand, In my opinion these are the things that prevent success:

• people want a quick / easy solution; they don’t want to be told that success online often means hard work, but that doesn’t mean it has to be dull - it can be very interesting, but you need the passion in the first place

• Don’t load pages with keywords or keyphrases. This is spam, and Google knows it.

• Using Flash and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – I consider this is the most important to remember. As you can see, search engines cannot index images and graphics, but with Flash, they cannot even properly index the text embedded in the flash. The text animated is of no use to the search engine. It is important to know that search engines as well as humans like simple and easy to follow webpages, and not a complex and difficult to navigate website.

Overall, I think success can seem like a puzzle, something mysterious or inexplicable, or a riddle or difficult problem if there’s a lack of passion. I’ve been there, and I ended up viewing success purely in monetary terms. Now I have work I enjoy greatly, and success is much more than just earning money, it’s coming up with new ideas, implementing them, seeing how people react, and of course being acknowledge on what I do.