All keywords trend during a year. Keywords are hot during some parts of the year and not during others. Understanding these trends is vital to having a healthy search campaign.

This can be easily illustrated by a search I performed recently. As a Jeep Wrangler JK owner, I get excited at this time of year. After a long grey Ohio winter, I greatly look forward to folding down the soft top and taking the doors off my Jeep. Now that it is warming up, I did a quick search for “Jeep Door Removal” to refresh my memory about how to do it. But as a search guy, I was curious how many people are doing that same search now that it is warming up.

Trending for Jeep Door Removal

Obviously there are lots of searches happening for that term now, but I was interested to see that big spike during the last week in March.

So, what part does keyword trending play in a healthy search strategy? The first (obvious) answer is that you need to know when to target different keywords. You will get very little traffic (or conversions) during times of the year when traffic for specific terms is low.

But there is another side to keyword trends that can be illustrated by the Jeep search. Clearly traffic for that term is going to climb in the Spring. If you were a company that sold after-market parts, such as a door removal kit, you would want to be prepared as the search traffic increased. But, look at the micro-trend. Traffic falls after that March spike, then climbs again in April.

If you were unaware of that trend, you would see traffic decline for that term in your analytics reports. You might then deduce that something was wrong with your search strategy. It might cause you to rush to your SEM control panel and start tweaking, changing, editing… even though there was nothing wrong. The few weeks of traffic decline would actually be normal consumer behavior before the keyword traffic builds back up again.

Make sure you are analyzing the correct data before making changes to your search campaigns.

Note: Here is a great article about taking the doors of your Jeep Wrangler JK.

When Cuil (pronounced “cool”) was launched on July 28, 2008, there was a lot of optimism for what this new up-start search engine could do. In fact, the optimism was so grandiose that some labeled Cuil a “Google-killing” search engine.

I wrote about the engine and the “Google-killing” moniker here and here, for example. And poking back in time, the article from MSNBC.

With that much fanfare around the company, I thought it would be interesting to see what they are up to now. They went out of business on September 17, 2010. Gone. Done. Google, reportedly, is doing fine.

PowerSet, another engine that was labeled as a “Google killer,” and had hoped to out-smart Google? Purchased by Microsoft on July 1, 2008.

The reason why they failed is that both engines tried to solve problems that were not really problems. PowerSet claimed to be a “natural language” search engine — meaning you could type in questions instead keywords. But from my testing in the past noted, Google had no issues with natural language searches and handled them as easily as keyword-based searches.

Culi offered long descriptions about web pages in their search results. Looking at the masses of people that use Google, no one must have issues with the two sentence descriptions they offer.

The dilemma faced here were the layers of hyperbole on top of hype over a new product that didn’t solve anything or create a better experience. A valuable lesson for any brand.

After a full weekend of World Cup action from South Africa, I began to wonder just how popular it was turning out to be in the United States. I often tell clients that search engines are the largest focus groups in the world. So, I pulled some keyword data to see where in the US the World Cup was the most popular.

Keyword density map showing where World Cup related searches are taking place.

I wonder how many of those searches in Ohio are from me checking scores while at work?

This video provide a great, yet simple explanation of how search engines work:

Today is the official launch of Caffeine, a new method Google is using to index the web. Google is a little bit mum on if this is effecting the actual search ranking algorithms or if this update is designed more purely to increase the speed of updating the index.

Google’s description of Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

I applaud their efforts to keep content fresh and relevant. Speed of index, however, is not always useful. As a consumer, I am not concerned with Google’s ability to quickly index, say, Twitter, especially when a good portion of Twitter is simply noise. What I rely on Google for — and should be the crux of any search engine — is matching my query to relevant information.

A few years ago, search engines used to publish the size of their index. There was a race among the search engines to say they had indexed larger portions of the Web than any other search engine. There was a sub-text that a larger index was inherently better, as if they were comparing the size of their manhood. But again, the measure of a search engine is about how relevant the search results are for the consumer.

This is how Google rose to power. Back in Google’s infancy (2001), they were providing more relevant results to consumers despite the fact that their index was significantly smaller than Yahoo’s and Excite’s.

Back in October of last year, Bing announced it was indexing Twitter in real time. Again, with the sub-text that speed makes Bing better. Now Google launches Caffeine geared at indexing the web faster. I applaud these efforts, as long as they do not forget that relevancy is king.

Special thanks to Columbus AMA for inviting Jeff Ivany and myself to present on how to use Search and Social Media together. Below is our presentation.

Note: If you are interested in having someone from EnginePoint Marketing or Conrad Phillips Vutech present this topic at your organization or conference, please contact us. Our presentations are designed more for the personal touch with our presenters.

In February 2006, I stipulated that Google was on the verge of becoming the next Yahoo. I did not mean it as a complement. This analysis came about as I was (again) watching Yahoo’s product line fracture.

Yahoo had a strange history of creating competing products. It was either a case of one part of a large company not aware of what another part of a large company was doing, or there was no cohesive strategy from leadership. (Maybe both?) At one point Yahoo had it’s own image sharing service, only later to acquire Flickr. The services were never merged into one, single useful product. Yahoo Images (which is now a image searching engine)  limped along for awhile, then was eventually shut down. Similarly, Yahoo had MyWeb which was different than Yahoo Bookmarks, despite the fact they apparently did the same thing. Both of which were identical to Delicious, which Yahoo purchased and… you get the idea.

Along the way, Yahoo experienced lots of product drift and were usurped by Google. That we all know.  We also know that Google is a very, very smart company. So why are they repeating Yahoo’s mistakes?

Farhad Manjoo has a fantastic article on Slate.com (link: Déjà Google) pointing out that Google seems to be repeating the same folly of Yahoo. Google is spinning out products that directly compete with other products they have already created. A few highlights:

• Newly launched Google Buzz will tell your friends where you are… duplicating Google Latitude which was launched last year
• Orkut already offered social media online profiles, but that didn’t stop Google from launching Google Profiles
• Google offers to save your bookmarks so they are available on any computer, but it is not-compatible with Chrome’s bookmarking feature that allows you to save your bookmarks so they are available on any computer.

Which brings me back to my original post from February 2006, Google is the Next Yahoo!, that points out that Microsoft could beat Google if Google accidentally becomes too much like Yahoo.

Looks like that is happening. OK, Microsoft it’s your move.

You have to hand it to marketers for their ability to jump on a trend. In fact, it’s one of the core strengths of SEM — the ability to very quickly show ads for hot searches that may relate to your product line. It is interesting to me how companies attempt to capitalize on pop culture trends.

Example: the recent scuttlebutt over Tiger Woods and speculation over what the heck actually happened. All my years of search experience tell me that search traffic around his name has skyrocketed. I don’t need to check the hard data (though I did, and searches for Woods are volcanic), I just know that human nature plays itself out on a search engine.  We may all say we don’t like gossip, but search data says otherwise. We are addicted to gossip.

We could argue that Tiger Woods is entitled to his privacy. Without a doubt, I agree. What I’m watching is the search traffic and what effects its causing. All of those golf companies that bid on “Tiger Woods” as a keyword to help sell golf equipment have probably seen impressions increase many times over. In fact, right now may not be the best time to advertise with “Tiger Woods” related terms since most of the searches are no longer golf related.

Which is why I find it interesting who is still advertising on Tiger Woods’ name. Namely eBay.

eBay ad for Tiger Woods. Screenshot taken on Dec 1, at 10:30AM.

What exactly is eBay selling? Clearly they, or whomever runs their SEM campaign, is not paying attention. It appears to me, Tiger Woods is for sale on eBay. eBay is not in the gossip business. The ROI on that ad has to be zero.

Poor word choice, poor execution, poor timing, poor marketing.

Yahoo! and Microsoft… Microsoft and Yahoo!. Together at last. Despite what they may say about increasing innovation and the operating income of each company, this deal is about one thing: Google.

The basic terms of the deal include Microsoft running the search engine portion, in essence, making Yahoo! search an extension of Bing. Yahoo will run the ad platform. This makes perfect sense, as Yahoo! has not considered search to be a core business product for years, and didn’t really want to get its hands dirty fighting Google.

Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t mind getting its hands dirty. More than that, they hate being second at anything and has show a willingness to tap their deep pockets to fund a fight. Microsoft sank nearly $500 million dollars into the Xbox before seeing a profit. That’s how bad they wanted to beat the PlayStation.

This sort of agreement is not new to Yahoo!. Around 2000, Yahoo’s search platform was powered by Google. Then someone at Yahoo! woke up and realized Google was actually a competitor, so the rushed a search platform into development.

The only thing that surprised me was the length of the agreement. Ten years! That’s five complete product life cycles on the internet. It seems improbably that these two companies could get along that long to make that time line a smart move. A deal of that length says one thing to me.

Yahoo! and Microsoft are heading for a merger. This lengthy arraignment is the equivalent of dating before they get married.

I surf the web a lot, but I’m still stunned from time-to-time when someone tries to fool a search engine to get better rankings. Sites do this in different ways: spamming, link baiting, cloaking… there are hundreds of “black hat” search techniques.

In almost all cases the webmaster goes to lengths to hide these techniques. In other instances, they don’t. Or more likely, the person doesn’t know they have tipped-toed into questionable SEO waters.

Which leads us today’s installment of “things not to do when optimizing your site.”

A few weekend searches over the nuances of Soccer rules, brought my wife to this page: (found here: http://www.soccerhelp.com/Soccer_Field_Index.shtml)

If it is not good for the user, then it is not good for the engine.

A close look reveals the problem, specifically the section that says “Dear visitor, ignore these links, they are for the search engines.”

All content is equal.

The rule of thumb is that search engines want to experience a site the exact same way a real, human user would. If content not intended for human eyes, then a search engine doesn’t want to “see” it either. Even if you try to section it off in a fun, tongue-in-cheek way on your site.