Google Trends just released. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
Here’s the hot trends for today
Check it out!
–aj
Google Analytics is now sporting a new dashboard interface and has added some nice stats.
Google Analytics is for the serious webmaster who wants additional information on what is going on a particular website. If you are a freelancer, one cool thing about Analytics is you can share reports (with view only permissions) to your client (Google account needed).
It’s about time Google re-design Analytics. It had some usability issues and it wasn’t user friendly before the change.
Kudos to the Google Analytics team!
–aj
How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?
- Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
- Use 301s: If you have restructured your site, use 301 redirects (”RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, the Googlebot, and other spiders.
- Be consistent: Endeavor to keep your internal linking consistent; don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm.
- Use TLDs: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that .de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than /de or de.example.com.
- Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.
- Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools: If other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can let us know which way you prefer your site to be indexed.
- Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
- Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. This means not publishing (or at least blocking) pages with zero reviews, no real estate listings, etc., so users (and bots) aren’t subjected to a zillion instances of “Below you’ll find a superb list of all the great rental opportunities in [insert cityname]…” with no actual listings.
- Understand your CMS: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.
- Don’t worry be happy: Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.
Tracking your buzz is really something that is becoming more and more important over and will continue to increase in importance as time goes on. Everything is going social right now and messages fly around the web at a million miles by hour. In order to manage your reputation you need to track the right things, so here’s a list of 10 things that you absolutely need to be monitoring.
1. Company name - Obviously your company name is one of the most important things that you need to monitor. Anytime your company or products are mentioned, you should know. Ex. Google
2. Company URL - It is also important to track your company URL for those times when someone links to your company but doesn’t mention it by name. This happens a lot and is just another way to make sure you are covering all your bases. Ex. Google
3. Public facing figures - Track the names of any key employees in your company that are public facing figures. What is said about these people also reflects on your company and usually when this people are talked about your company is tied in with that. Ex. Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page.
4. Product names - Track any of your company’s product or service names as well. What are people saying about your products and services? Ex. Gmail, Picasa, Dodgeball
5. Product URLs - For the same reasons that you need to specifically track your company’s URL you should also be tracking your product URLs as well. Ex. Gmail, Picasa, Dodgeball
6. The industry “hang outs” - This includes blogs, message boards, important players, consumer review sites, and anything else that’s related to your industry. Many times the industry feedback, that you can discover from the conversations at these “hang outs” can really help you improve your product or service. It is also a way for you to interactive with your potential and existing customers. Ex. http://searchenginewatch.com, http://seroundtable.com, http://threadwatch.org
7. Employee activity/blogs - Things your employees do online can affect your brand image. If you have employees that blog, it is smart to at least know about their MySpace accounts, Flickr accounts and personal blogs. I am not saying that you should spy on your employees but you do need to monitor these things just in case. It is not considered spying if they already make this stuff public. It might be safe to let your employees know you watch these things. The more well known your employees are the more important this is, many times these employee bloggers turn into company ambassadors. I’ve heard stories before where employers know an employee is quitting before he or she tells them because they blogged about it or put it on MySpace. Ex. http://mattcutts.com/blog, http://bladam.com, http://crazybob.org
8. Conversations - Are you tracking the comments from blog posts that are related to your company name, url, products, or any other buzz? These are great opportunities that allow you to participate in conversations about your company. Tools for tracking comments include Commentful, coComment, and co.mments. Ex. http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/62569.html, http://www.digg.com/software/Google_Talk_Adds_Voice_Mail_File_Sharing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36648272/
9. Brand image - What is the overall image of your brand. Do people think you’re evil? Or do they love what you’re doing. Ex. http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=google
10. Competitors - Track everything from 1-9 related to your competitors including; company name, URLs, products, key employees, etc. Everything. You need to be ready to move when any opportunity comes up. Ex. http://www.ysearchblog.com, http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/, http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=yahoo
Here is a list of a few of the websites / tools that can be used to track your buzz: Technorati, Sphere, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google Blog Search, Rollyo, TechMeme, OpinMind, Alexa, and Commentful. Any time your company is referenced in any way it is best that you know about it. Track everything.
11. Also monitor images/video, (Edit: Podcasts too! suggests Brian) such as flickr instances of your company, products, and employees. You may be surprised how your brand or products could be treated (think about the kids who raised money for an iPod to then smash it for online video, exploding laptops, and bike locks that get picked by a pen cap).
12. Monitor tags and Social search tools such as Delicious.
13. Monitor Social Voting tools like Digg.com (strong search) and Techmeme.com (which doesn’t have a strong search yet).
14: This is nearly a part-time job for a small company, and nearly a full-time job for a company with large brand equity, or heavy activity. There are several firms that can offer listening services, but use that for reporting only. Train your product teams to learn how to listen, also consider offering forums for customers so you can bring conversations closer.
15: Also consider creating a feedback mechanism that allows customers to post URLs of conversations that they want you to see –why spend all the time searching, when you could also encourage customers, employees to submit links
16: Lastly, create a “Voice of the Customer†log in your intranet, perhaps using a blog, database, or other tool that can track sentiment, instance, and or voice.
17: Consider devoting an individual or team to this. I suspect in the next few years, roles will appear called “Brand Monitor†or “Blogosphere Watcherâ€, It’s not just about ‘reporting’ but more like “real-time monitoring†of the voice of your customer. You can harness this to build better products, services, and be a better company.
18. Self-clipping services like Google or Yahoo alerts for keyword mentions, but also audio and video hits as well…services like PodZinger for example to ascertain conversational audio levels
19. Utilize RSS and aggregators like Bloglines in order to aggregate, integrate and assimilate all relevant incoming and outgoing moments of truth (perceived truth perhaps, or even truthiness according to Rob Stevens)
20. Use wikis like PmWiki to discuss and debate pretty much everything from 1-19 and most importantly attempt to turn all the talk/conversation into walk/action.
21. (ending on 20 would have been so contrived) Repeat steps 1-20 to look outside of your own circle. Evolve the perspective from yourself, through your direct competitive set to your indirect competitive set and ultimately to your aspirational/non-endemic/non-competitive set. This is where you want to follow the leaders so to speak - Apple, Nike, Google or whichever company you admire.
22. Create a PROACTIVE capability/budget in order to QUICKLY execute against everything you’re monitoring - specifically opportunities like Fedex Furniture, Tiger Chipping in on the 16th.
23. Conversely, have a REACTIVE process in place to comprehensively and compellingly respond, especially when you’re on the bumpy receiving end of the stick.
CREDITS:
http://www.jaffejuice.com/ (18-23)
http://www.web-strategist.com/ (11-17)
http://www.pronetadvertising.com/ (1-10)
