He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

In our company, we frequently change search settings to look at different results. There are a couple reasons why we make changes. First, if a page that we are optimizing is in the top 10 result – great. But occasionally, pages are lower especially at the beginning of a campaign. In this case, we need to see where the page is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. We change our settings to expand the results so that we can quickly find where a webpage is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. To do this we click the Search Settings link and change the Number of Results from the default of 10 to 100 results per page. Then we use Ctrl-F and the company’s URL to find the page we are looking for. The position of the listing on the scroll bar is a quick way to estimate where the page is within the 100 results. If we need a precise ranking number we switch back to the default of 10 results and page down and find the listing manually. Or we will run a ranking report to get the full list of keywords and their positions.

Another reason we may change the settings to 100 results per page is to see which pages might be used as an alternative in the SERP. For example, if you search for “business laptops” in Google.com you will see one listing for Dell, www.dell.com/business/laptop. If you change your settings to 100 results per page you will see 2 results. The second result is indented, http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebooks&cs=28&s=dfb. It is our experience that this second listing is Google’s way of testing additional pages. Most people performing searches won’t see this indented page but some will.

So I clicked on the icon. A new window opened up with the word and a definition. Very cool.

Try it. Go to this page: A New World: Scheduling E-Books. I’m following articles on ebooks because I think they have potential. I don’t own one, yet. (Hint to my sons, Riley and Daniel, my birthday is in September.) With your cursor, highlight the word “hardcover” in the first sentence. Notice the ? icon that pops up. Click on the ? mark. A new window will pop-up with the definition of “hardcover”. The alt tag suggests that this feature is called “Lookup Word”.

I still use Google to “define” words because I like the various perspectives that Google finds but this feature on NYTimes has value.

A resent study by Catalyst Group as quoted by Website Magazine suggests that users of Bing stay on the results page longer than searchers using Google. This is preliminary data and there were only 6 subjects in the test. Website Magazine conludes that staying on the site is positive but I’m not sure that the results of the study are fair. Google has been in the market place for over 6 years and consumers are very familiar with the interface. I’m sure the subjects looked at the result pages very quickly. In contrast, Bing is brand new and the interface is different (I don’t mind it actually). My guess is that the subjects were also new to Bing and as a result spent more time looking at the interface and the results.

What are your thoughts?

Jeff

Matthew in our company is going to look at Bing in a later post so I’ll skip that one.

WolframAlpha is not actually a search engine per se.  Steven Levy of Fortune writes that Wolfram is an “engine for answers”. WolframAlpha was developed by Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame – sophisticated computational software. In other words, WolframAlpha is great for information related to numbers.

Let’s try some examples. In the search window type “mars” and click on the compute button. What you don’t get is a list of web pages. Instead WolframAlpha gives you information about Mars listed as Results. You will discover that Mars is 11.69 light minutes from earth. Unfortunately, I can’t remember from Physics what a “light minute” is, so I looked that up. One light minute is the distance light travels in one minute – 11.18 million miles. So Mars is a long way from earth – 179.7 million miles in fact.

Now for something different. Type in “ACTCGTC” and compute (another example suggested by Steven Levy). To the untrained eye this looks like gibberish or code. In fact this symbolized gentitc code. Results will give you details on human genome information.

If you type in the date of your birth, WolframAlpha will return some interesting details about that specific day. I was born on a Saturday.

You can also use WolframAlpha to look up financial stats on public companies. Compute results for Google. How many companies can claim $1.24 million per employee? Yahoo is just over $500,000. Microsoft is $700, 000. Exxon is nearly $6 million – Wow.

Kewl stuff but let’s switch gears to SearchMe. This is a search engine in a traditional sense but the results are graphical. Instead of text like Google, the whole web page of a site is displayed in a similar way to iTunes.  Interesting but I prefer reading text results because it is faster for me to scan a page then clicking to a website.

Jeff

To activate Wonder Wheel you click on Show Options, scroll down and then click on Wonder Wheel. You should get the following results page with a interface that is like a wheel.

You may want to look at this video for more detailed information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ah7ZWYjxdM