Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Knowing more about your competition and your market than your competitors is of course advantageous for your business. Sometimes we can come too focused on our own data, looking at our own traffic, stats. and conversions. But what about the competition ? Maybe they are also improving, but at a great rate. Getting your hands on their data can be that little bit more tricky.

Here I will show you some tips on learning about search trends, changes in search patterns and popularity of websites, with a few nice examples. These should be a great way to start to look at your competition.

Search Frequency

The tool of choice is,Google Trends . It allows users to compare trends in search which is very useful to see how search frequency is changing. Here is an example of the difference in the search frequency between blackberry’s two new products (bold and storm) over the last month.

The values presented are relative (and possibly on a logarithmic scale) as opposed to absolute so it is a little  difficult to exactly quantify the difference in the searches frequency. But you do see which one is a clear winner. Also Google has the possibility to show the related news frequency, so you can see how hot the topic is, and find out  the reason for a specific increase in the number of searches about the topic.

Knowing the search frequency can help when you are running seasonal campaigns. Have a look at the comparison between Christmas and Valentines search traffic. Here you can have a great idea when you should start your PPC campaigns for example.

Website Popularity

The send part of Google Trends is what they called Website Trends. This is really a website popularity tool, which shows an estimate of the traffic going to websites of your choice. As usual it’s always a little bit easier with an example. Here is the comparison between myspace.com and facebook.com .

As you can see there was a cross over in popularity at the end of last year. Facebook is still gaining numbers of visitors, while myspace is starting to decay slightly.

Google trends really comes into it’s own where we can now look at the regions, again looking at myspace and facebook, but this time the data is based on Irish information.

We see that the crossover in terms of traffic happened more around the middle of September 2007.  With advertising programs on both Facebook and MySpace, I know which one I would be targeting more and more as a business.

Comparison between Irish Newspaper websites

The whole reason for this study was that I wanted to see what was the most popular online newspaper in Ireland, and to see there has been any changes in the last year. Here is the data for some Irish newspaper websites, and interestingly enough we can see some important events.

First off we can see the rise in the use of the domain irishtimes.com from July 2008, this was due to the Irish Times separating the news from the ireland.com domain. It remains that the Irish Times and the Independent are the top 2 most read Irish newspaper websites, and there seems to be little movement for the others in the field. Also we can see that over all the number of people visiting these websites is increasing.

Give Google Trendsa whirl and let me know if you come up with some interesting trends.

Just checking on my google reader (reader.google.com) this morning and I was surprise when I checked the details tab on CopyBlogger (www.copyblogger.com). Google have now added some more stats. Before you were only able to see the number of subscribers (no sure how accurate it was) and the post frequency. Now google is letting us know a little more, and also looks at how you read this particular blog.

How many times a day they blog

Number of blog posts over the last 30 days

At what time of the day are the posts published

So here we see that google has metrics on usage of blogs. They are building up patterns of usage for the users. I’m guessing that they not only use this data to show us something nice, but that these factors could be fed back into the Google Machine and taken into account some way.
When you think about it, especially for blogs, having a usage profile it quiet interesting. It could be considered that these blogs that say, have a higher reader frequency, have a consistent blogging frequency  would be more important/trusted. These profiles could also be used for identifying splogs (spam blogs) or could even be a factor in ranking parts of a website. Google has access to a whole load of information from services like Google Reader, Google Analytics and FeedBurner. Now I am wondering if there is a feedback loop that effects your rankings in some little way. Sure why not ?
So if you don’t have a blog already, maybe you should think of getting one !

Damien has set in motion a little competition for SEOs. This competition has a little Irish spin on it, aimed at Irish  businesses and Irish individuals. Where he is looking for people to rank on the PFI (Pages from Ireland) on google.ie for the keyword “geansai gorm“. The phrase in English means “Blue Jumper” but to avoid the pollution of the index, he has chosen an Irish word so not to knock the people who produce gorm geansais, out of business.

There are a few rules (so don’t forget to read them), and it will be interesting to see how closely they are adhered to, I can already (in the space of a few hours) see that one person is breaking rule #3.

I’ve decided to take part, and will be hoping that mybluejumper.com will come to the fore and will win. Either way it’ll be a bit of fun. I’ll be twittering my ideas under the name gorm_geansai, so feel free to follow me. I’m not sure how much time I can devote to this, but I will give it a go.

And while I am on the topic of twitter, I finally got around to using my account, feel free to follow that also. It’s at twitter.com/savagepaul.

Recently I was searching for a list of all the regional google domains, and my searching failed. I was interested in seeing just how many regional versions of google, do they offer. Plus it would allow me to update my Google Global Firefox extension with a few more domains. Most people are aware that the version of the Irish Google is located at www.google.ie and that in Germany you can use www.google.de . But what about in Turkmenistan or Rwanda or Jamaica ? Searching a bit more I came across Google’s Langauage Tools page. This is the basis of their translation engine, their listing of what languages you can make google search appear in, and right down the end, a listing of all the Google regional domains.

Ranking on Regional Domains

The regional domains give preference to websites that are related to that region. Things that can influence your standing here include:

• Business address listing in Google and on your webpages.
• Domain name from that specific TLD. i.e. for google.de , using a .DE domain.
• Domain targeting on your Google Webmaster panel.
• Frequency of other locally related links.
• Server location, based on IP address targeting.

Also it is possible that language of a website and keywords in the domain have some lesser effects too.

While most people are aware of Google.com, there are also significant numbers of people using their local version of search. In fact Google will often redirect users to their local version of the search, as they know that the results which appear on regional search is typically more suited to searchers.

The net effect of having regional rankings, is that there can be different results in the SERPS for each version. Logically this makes sense, when someone searches google.ie for mortgages, it’s clear they are only looking for companies related to the Irish market, and the same is true on google.co.uk, etc. And the sensitivity tothe Irish market can be cranked up even more by selecting the “pages from Ireland” option.

For users this is great, but for a SEOs it can mean that we need to check multiple versions of google, to see the regional differences. But of course the positive side is that the competition to rank locally is a lot less

Listing of Regional Domains

As the format that google provides is rather awkward to use, I decided to put together an excel list, maybe this will be easier for people to use. In all there are 162 regional google domains, which took about 15 minutes to organise into a nice formula. The list can be downloaded from google docs and I will updated it if google adds some more regional sites.

It is also notable that google doesn’t show versions on all it’s domains, i.e. google.us redirects to google.com. And there are even some domains that they don’t own , namely Google.by and Google.cm.

EDIT : Seeing as someone emailed me and pointed out that the google docs version isn’t that easy to use, here is a CSV version of the regional google domains. I hope this works for people a bit better.

Popping by SEMScholar.com this morning, I read an interesting post by David Temple where he cites the fact that he has a slight reputation management issue when the top to SERP results for his name return details about an murderer called David Temple ! It actually struck a chord with me, because a few years ago there was a Paul Savage in Wales, who was murdered, thankfully the news story is no longer showing high up in the SERPS. But having people search for your name, and getting results that are less than complementary can indeed be dangerous to your reputation. What do you do when you find people are searching for you, but ranking for these terms is harder than you think ?

Looking at the google search results for Paul Savage, I see that a relevant result only appears on page 2. This could be due to many factors, such as:

• The name I have is really really popular – which it isn’t, well not along the lines of say “John Smith” anyway. Take “Yaro Starak“, google his first name and you’ll see that his sites come up first.
• The fact that there is some other high profile Paul Savage out there – more or less true as there is a Professor of Chemistry in Utah with the same name.
• Or just down to the sheer lack of links with the anchor text pointing to here – BINGO.

One hard part of link building is making sure that the links you get have a relevantly useful link text. This is easier said than done for links that you don’t have control over. Sometimes a simple note via emailing requesting a tweak could do the trick, but more often than not webmasters don’t have the time to go back and update all these various links.

So one short goal I have for the next few months is to start to register somewhere in the SERPS on the front page for my name. It’s always nice for people  to find easily you when they are searching for you. Actually this is the reason why I link to the blogs I read via their real name, if you are not on the list, do let me know ! And before I go, any link love, with my name as an anchor text  will be accepted with open arms .

Today I was checking up on a bit of the competition, looking at this keyword [seo dublin]. I would guess the term SEO Dublin would be mildly competitive, and that companies in the top 5 would be on top of their game . But I was surprised to see again that there was one listing where google was saying that “This site may harm your computer” when you click on a link to IrishInterMarketing’s website.

My first reaction was  that of surprise and intrigue that this could happen to an IT services company.  So being  being the good  Samaritan, I decided to have a look at the site (disabling javascript first) to inform them  of the potential problem. Just remember that if Google flags your site like this, you won’t get any direct traffic.  Google will tell you to copy and past the URL at your own risk.   Visiting their site  I see that there is a n embedded javacript file inserted “optimised” META keywords tag from the domain adwnetw.com.

Now having an idea what the problem was, I was tried to use their contact form, but alas it was completely unusable, it appeared more to be for a sign-up form for an email list, rather than a contact form. Even if this was the form I needed, I couldn’t use it because there wasn’t a submit button anywhere to be seen !

Next I checked their lovely About Us page.

Besides the  fact that  there seems to be  major bugs in their HTML code, and resulting in a poor  rendering of their web page , I was able to find the contact number.  Then I gave the  Dublin  number a call (from Munich where I current am),  hoping to tell someone  that their website  has been compromised . Sadly all I got was the lovely screech of a  FAX machine.

Not wanting to try any other methods to contact this uncontactable souls, I gave up, and decided to pen another blog post instead.