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 –>

Comscore have released some interesting stats regarding the different types of universal results in the Google search results page (SERP).

source: http://www.comscore.com

James Lamberti draws the conclusion that the popularity of video is mostly driven by a combination of consumers and Google itself. However I’d disagree, and argue that Google is not responsible at all, simply Google is responding to what the consumer market is naturally demanding.

It would make sense that this would lead to a greatly increased volume in entertainment traffic as the nature of web usage changes, and thus an increasing popularity of video and YouTube in universal search results. Looking at the popularity of YouTube beyond Google this also matches our research into social bookmarking service DIGG.com which showed that YouTube was by far the website that reached the homepage of DIGG most frequently.

Definitely this will be an ongoing trend, and would not be surprised to see YouTube taking an even more prominent place on Google in the future.

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.

In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine ranking and advertising to create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web pages.

However, do SEO professionals really “get” website usability, and is it a benefit for website owners to hire such firms to promote their company or organization sites in the commercial web search engines? Below are the opinions from a well-known SEO’s about “What should SEO professionals know about usability?”

Usability testing and SEO

“The word usability serves as a boundary object that invites diverse communities of practice to share experiences and negotiate solutions,” said Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios and author of the renowned books, Information Architecture for the WWW and Ambient Findability. “For instance, as an information architect who consults with major corporations, it’s vital for me to understand usability heuristics and perform usability tests, but it’s equally essential that I go beyond usability.”

Heuristic analysis and SEO

The goal of a heuristic evaluation is to usability problems early in the design of a Web site so that improvements can be made as part of the iterative design process (Source: http://www.usability.gov/methods/heuristiceval.html). Though Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich came up with some outstanding guidelines in the early 90s, their research and others’ continues to evolve, as web site usability is an iterative process.

Conclusion

Both website usability and SEO/SEM are iterative processes, meaning that methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a work in progress (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_design). At the heart of iterative design is the objective observation of interaction between users and an interface: not focus groups, not web analytics, and not an SEO professionals’ personal opinion about website usability.

[via Searchengineland] Shari Thurow is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility.

Once you have launched your own business blog, how can you use it as an effective marketing tool to promote your company? All it takes is a few carefully honed strategies and ideas. It is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes like Keyphrasesearchmarketing.com, to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers.

I’ve read a blog from a Search Engine Marketing Consultant, Jennifer Sleg and she listed the reasons why people should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to their overall business marketing strategy. Here are some advantages if you’re using your blog as a marketing tool;

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry.

In the business world, company owners and employees use them to develop deeper relationships with customers and prospects. For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies, as long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool. If you are strategizing and getting ready to launch a corporate blog, 20 Best Practices for Launching a Corporate Blog is a must read. And if you already have a company blog, you might find Why Your Company or Corporate Blog is Failing useful.

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.

[via a welsh view] Ecocho: A new search engine trying to make a difference for climate change. For every 1000 searches users make on Ecocho we’ll counter balances or ‘offset’ up to a ton of greenhouse gases. They do this by sponsoring two trees via advertising on the site.

It uses Yahoo and Google results and for every 1,000 searches made on the site they will donate 2 trees. So far they’ve planted 3,241 trees and offset 1.6KG of CO2.

Search now and grow trees!

Aaron Wall on preemptive spam penalties and Google’s relationship with SEO companies.

“Google is determined to make any scalable link building process black hat. It won’t be long before all off topic link bait, including articles, is considered link spam.” Read more –>

Theres a lot of question comes on my mind; Are widgets spam? Why does Google comes down so much harder on individual SEO than Corporations? How far could Google go?

Trading freebies for links seems very fair to me. I don’t think we are violating Google on this kind of practice. I know now why some people prefers:

• outsource SEO kept confidential
• use companies to market widgets and applications

Google moves is really unpredictable nor unstoppable, they always refine algorithm to give so called “relevant search result” to the users. Are we really getting relevant results nowadays? Trying to banned websites as many as they can.

I want to share this one comment on Aaron’s post:

“Personally I think that Google is the organization that needs to be more transparent. If the rules as they defined them are not being applied universally than there are ethics issues at hand. Favoritism and discrimination are strong words but this smells bad to me. Are SEOs being descriminated against? Aaron described it as “arbitrary judgement” but I think there is more to it. If you put lipstick on a pig it is still a pig… right?

Unfortunately we all get a taste of that harsh reality at some point in our lives (not all people are treated equally….shocker). The reality is the corporations with the deepest pockets will play by different rules as they always have and always will. It is simple economics Google answers to the stockholders and the almighty dollar.  by ourmonmouth“

I totally agree with that comment. It is clear that Google is abusing power.

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.