Google trends has been both a fun tool as well as a decent research platform to gather data about keywords. Now Google Trends is giving us the ability to export the data in .csv format all the way back to 2004. When searching in Google Trends, separate the keywords (mustang,camaro,charger) you want to compare with commas in order to see the difference in search query popularity over time. Click on image to view larger.

The data shows you spikes in web searches with related articles that may help explain what was happening in the market at those specific times. This obviously helps your analytics should you question any major shifts. The best part of the comparison data is now you can export the statistical results as a .csv to archive, modify or as a means for market predictions and forecasting. The data is served complete with the standard deviation error and provides a great comparison of the competing terms over time. See example…

You have to give it to Google. They are constantly making their data more transparent and providing us with free tools to help market predictions. Granted our free tools come at a price of privacy to some extent but in the long run their free tools like Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and AdWords are changing the face of online marketing.

The easiest way to protect your brand is to provide goods and services that keep your customers and clients happy. Don’t be afraid to ask them for their feedback. We just may give it on a global scale.

I have always been big on positive feedback. I have been know in the past to call customer service, not to make a complaint, but to let management know how much I appreciate the service provided by their company. Now armed with the advantage of the internet, I hope to do this on a larger scale. This all started when I went through the process of buying a Mustang. I was able to find an amazing dealer from out of state who was easy to work with and made the process real easy. I thanked them the best way I knew how. I wrote a quick post about them and optimized it on their brand. Interestingly enough I am currently the #1 result in Google for a few of their brand terms. I actually established that position within 16 hours of publishing the post.

How was this possible? I wrote good quality content about the company and optimized the post around their brand. I did nothing sneaky. Everything was purely white hat. The fast time frame was due to me getting lucky by publishing the post shortly before Google cached my homepage. In theory this positioning should have taken a couple weeks to months. Two other factors that helped me out are that their company website is poorly structured and there is little to no competition to small business brand terms.

The point of doing this was to provide future shoppers a decent write up of my experiences with the company. Hopefully someday someone will read the post and feel a little more comfortable doing business with them. I know I did my research on the company and found very little in terms of feedback from previous customers when I was about to buy. The internet is a powerful tool for acquiring information. My plan is to do what I can to do just that. Inform people on some good quality brands out there.

The longer my positive post stays out there, the more it will age like fine wine and help protect the integrity of a brand. Of course this could go both ways. If I ever feel that I have been taken advantage of, there is no doubt in my mind that I will follow the same process in attacking a brand so people can be informed.

First let me explain the sandbox theory. The sandbox effect is said to exist for new websites to discourage spam farms and short term link builders from being a valid result from search queries. That being said, it is often argued that it is better to buy an existing domain to build on then to develop a web from a new domain. I decided to put this to the test and develop 2 pages to rank for the term Brian McDowell.

Site 1
URL: http://www.GrubbDawg.com/
AGE: December 01, 2001
DESCRIPTION: The site has the phrase Brian McDowell on the home page one time. Brian McDowell is used as anchor text and links to Brian McDowell’s Linked-in profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcdowell. This page has a PR of 0 and no incoming links (0 according to Google. 52 according to Yahoo). The site was not optimized for the term in any way. The terms Brian and McDowell did not appear in the meta information at the time of the test (or ever in the history of the site). The GrubbDawg home page fails W3C validation with 8 errors.

Site 2
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcdowell
AGE: June 04, 2003
DESCRIPTION: The site has the term Brian McDowell on the page 5 times. Brian is used 12 times, McDowell is used 5 and McDowell’s is used 6 times. This site has a PR of 0 and has 0 incoming links from Google. The only link it has from Yahoo are from the GrubbDawg domain which you would assume would pass authority to this page. The Brian McDowell Linked-In profile fails W3C validation with 68 errors. The Term Brian McDowell appears in the meta title and the meta description.

I chose to test the sandbox theory on the name Brian McDowell since it is a non-competitive key phrase and top positioning should take little effort. Once I put the link in place, I sat back and waited for the infamous caching. Keep in mind that GrubbDawg was initially built with a flash entry page and was a test site since creation outside of the eyes of the search engines. This is the first time there was any relation for the term Brian McDowell.

The results? My search query on Google for the term Brian McDowell turned up both pages in the top 10 (positions 6 and 7 to be exact) in a matter of 2 weeks. During that time, no effort was put in to optimize either site for Brian McDowell or any other term. Both pages were untouched.

What now? Well obviously I created this writeup on optimizing for Brian McDowell so let’s see how long it takes to surpass the homepage. I also purchased a brand new domain to bring into the game. Stay tuned as my next writeup will be about Brian McDowell playing in the sandbox.

So as I mentioned before, I decided to go with WordPress for my blogging site. As an SEO professional, site structure was at the top of my list as was the tools I will be engaged with at home and at work. My career path has taken me from the land of ASP.net into the dark world of PHP (so long Microsoft, it was a fun ride). One of the things I liked about WordPress was the wealth of Plug-ins available and the ease of use. The first plug in I enabled was “All-in-one SEO” by Uberdose. This enables me to toss in the noindex functionality for archives to avoid some of the duplicate content issues. It also makes those stubern meta tags easier to maintain. There is a lot more work to do but the blog is young and ready to cultivate.