The Maine SEO Blog

Online trends are changing constantly, just look at the new Google Insights for Search to find that out.  What’s especially interesting about Insights is their “rising searches” element – showing you what the “hot” new searches are.

While performing a single keyword analysis and optimizing a site is great (and i obviously highly recommend doing it), it’s also important to constantly optimize your site.  SEO is an ongoing process.

Change for the sake of “hot” keywords

There is a “myth” in the SEO world that says copy which is constantly updated and changed will rank higher, simply because Google’s spiders have to crawl the site more often.  Whether this is true or not isn’t the point.  There is no reason to change copy just for the sake of change.  That being said, copy can and should be updated and molded over time to follow keyword trends.

For example, if I own a business where I breed and sell Labrador Retrievers, and today the hot keywords are for yellow labs and black labradors.  (NOTE: I have not done the research, and in fact, have no idea if people are searching for those words.)  But in a month or two, I find people are search for labrador retrievers, I might add the word “retriever(s)” into my title tags and copy a few more times.

The key, as always, is to make your changes naturally, without stuffing keywords.

Change for experiment’s sake

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: while we have an idea of what causes high rankings, we’ll never know for sure.  That’s why experimentation is helpful.

In my dog selling business, I might optimize something (say, my title tags) for my geographic location.  Then, a few months later, maybe I’ll optimize for the fact that we have every color labrador (yellow, chocolate, and black).  Or perhaps, I will update my robots.txt file, adding my contact page.  Then, I could also add a new page about how to train puppies, because I found in my keyword research that “How to Train Your New Puppy” was a hot keyword phrase (again, I have not done the actual research).

What’s the point?

The point is that you need to constantly be optimizing and follow keyword trends.  Continuously looking for opportunities for backlinks is also important, but a topic for another time…

Also, remember site changes take time to be recognized by spiders.  It can take up to six weeks for Google to update their index, and even longer for rankings to change accordingly.

Nicki Hicks
Yes, Labs are my favorite

Google has put its algorithms to good use and given a great gift to SEOs everywhere: introducing Google Insights! The great part is that you don’t necessarily need to be an SEO to appreciate this, so let’s see all the fun things it can do, shall we?

I performed a search for “SEO” under the default location setting of “worldwide” and time range “2004 – present,” and added the “Internet” category. This is the map of where those searches come from globally:

You can see both with the colors on the map as well as the numbers to the left how easy it is to see where the majority of searchers are coming from.  Then I changed my query to view a graph that shows the growth of the search term “SEO” as it is relative to the “Internet” category over the past four years (this graph still shows the global results):

SEO is going up..Up…UP!! (As is the “Internet”!)  You can also compare a given search term over a given period of time with Insights. The following graph shows how the search volume for “SEO” has increased between 2004 and 2007 (this time we’re looking specifically at the United States):

It seems there are tons of possibilities with this new program. In a nutshell, you can cross reference any of the following with one another: search term, location, time range, and category – essentially making it possible to look through search history (since 2004, that is) pretty easily.

Nicki Hicks
“Insightful” SEO