When conducting keyword research, it is important to have as much information as possible so you can pick the best word for the page you are trying to optimize.  There are a plethora of tools available and some of our favorites include WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery and the Free Google Keyword Tool.  These tools are great because they can show you some very important statistics about each keyword.  Some stats that they show include approximate search volume and the competitiveness of the keyword.  The one thing they don’t show you however, is trending.  For that we recommend that you take a look at Google’s Insights for Search.

Insights for Search allows you to compare up to 5 keywords and look at trending data from as far back as 2004.  It also displays significant news stories or events that happened during the time frame so you can see how these events played a role in the search data for the keywords. Trending data such as this can help you to choose a better keyword.  Perhaps when cross referencing your researched terms with Insights, you will notice that a highly searched term is actually decreasing in trending data.  This might cause you to evaluate a different term that is a rising search, which you may not have discovered from your other keyword research tools alone.

Insights for Search also allows you to see related search terms, regional interest and rising searches.  In my opinion, the rising searches section is the most interesting.  These are words that you should be focusing on because they are becoming popular very quickly.  When you see “breakout” listed instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%.

The next time you are doing keyword research for a new page or blog, also consult Insights for Search to see what other keywords you might find.

Sometimes the same page in a website can get indexed multiple times, which could potentially create a duplicate content issue and penalty. The best example of this is a website’s default or home page…

http://www.domain.com/
http://www.domain.com/index.htm

Although both of these URLs resolve to the same page, the search engines could index both of them, or possibly one and not the other. However, situations like this are not just isolated to the home page. Most websites will have default filenames in URLs contained in subdirectories like this…

http://www.domain.com/about/
http://www.domain.com/about/index.htm

… which causes the same issues as the home page.  Additionally, sometimes the internal page linking structure could link to the page with or without the index.htm filename present. To prevent the default page from being accessed by its filename, we can add the following rule to our .htaccess file:

RewriteRule (.*)(index|home|default)\.(html|asp|aspx|htm|php)$ $1 [NC, R=301]

With this rule in place, when any page is requested with the default filename (index.htm) in the URL, the user will get 301 redirected to the default page without the filename. This will ensure that the default filename is never in the URL and that only one version of that page will get indexed by search engines.

Google has created a new option available for iPhones users and Android phones. This option appears when viewing Google’s website and uses the GPS of the phones to provide a search result within the area the user of the phone is located.

To use this feature, the “Near me now” option needs to be selected. This option is located below the Google search button and prompts the user asking if it’s ok for Google to use the current location.

After selecting the “Near me now” options you can update the current location by selecting the “update” option located on the same area as the near me now option. This feature displays multiple search options that allow users to narrow their search and make browsing on a mobile phone easier and faster.

The options available for search include restaurants, bars, ATMS/banks and an even wider selection is available when selecting the “browse more categories” option which includes shopping, gas and automotive, and healthcare, among others.

There is also an option to “star” a place and view the listing of all the places you have previously “stared”. This is available by selecting the star icon located at the right corner of the listing results.

When it comes to SEO, we see that searches from mobile devices are continuing to change to make its use easier for mobile users, as seen by this new implementation created by Google. For this reason, it is essential to place the location of your office or sub offices on your site and be part of Google’s local search. Even though this feature is only available for iPhones and Android phones, I would not be surprised to see it appear in the near future on more mobile devices.