Google has expanded since those innocent days when they were just a very good search engine.  One of their stated goals is to index every single piece of information in the world.  They have expanded into email, online (cloud-based) word processing/office productivity software, photo sharing, social networking, and many other areas.  Because of this omnipresence and the sheer amount of information that Google collects, the company has several privacy advocates up in the air.

In response to privacy concerns, Eric Schmidt (Google C.E.O.) made a very interesting statement in the Doc Zone documentary (which you can watch online).  Echoing free market ideals, he talked about how Google has to be in the business of protecting its users privacy because if it fails, the marketplace will find out, people will stop giving Google their personal information, and Google’s revenues will drop accordingly.

Not only an interesting statement, but an interesting deviation from a particularly boneheaded statement that Schmidt made in 2006, when he was quoted as saying:

I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

It is amazing how a few years (and a great Public Relations team) can change one’s tune from being completely offensive to being logical and relatively benign.  However, there is still a problem with Eric Schmidt’s most-recent statement.  The fact remains that, outside of some hardcore privacy advocates/researchers, the mainstream public is not necessarily aware of what information Google collects, what Google does with that information, and how/if we can opt out.

To shed a little bit of light on this, here are some things that Google uses your personal information for (this is a direct quote from http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html)

• Providing our services, including the display of customized content and advertising;
• Auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect and improve our services;
• Ensuring the technical functioning of our network;
• Protecting the rights or property of Google or our users; and
• Developing new services.

Consider what this means in context of the information that Google collects from you.  When you sign in to your Gmail account, Google will analyze every single email you have received and sent to figure out what sorts of things you are interested in.  And then, they will serve you targeted ads according to your interests.  However, their collection does not stop there – when you visit Google pages, they will set cookies on your browser, and use these cookies to learn more about you and your search habits.

I have read the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act cover to cover (amazing, amazing read) and I am not sure that Google’s privacy policy completely complies with Canadian law.  For example, Google sets cookies on your computer (and monitors things like your IP address) whether you log in to a Google account or not.  So, let’s say you log in to your Google account, check your email and write a document.  Then, you log out of your Google account, go to Google.ca and search for, “Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act”.  Does Google associate that search with your Google account, even though you were not logged in when you made the search?

Or how about Ben Edelman’s scary findings about how the Google Toolbar keeps transmitting personal information even after you choose to disable it?  Is that, in any way compliant with PIPEDA?  And, even more importantly, do any mainstream computer users know about this violation?  And finally, most importantly, does that problem still happen when Google Toolbar is installed in Canada?

I hope that this article starts a discussion, but I am, in no way implying that Google actively or knowingly violates PIPEDA.  Rather, I am putting this post here for information purposes and to start a more formal process where I am going to analyze some of Google’s activities from a privacy point of view.  My first step is going to be to try and replicate Ben Edelman’s findings three months after they were first published.  It is entirely possible that Google did not know that problem existed (I work for a software company, believe me, bugs slip through the most strenuous checks and balances).  And, it is my hope that this bug has been fixed.

I will keep you updated but until then, please think about where your personal information goes.

Check out his web site. It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen.

Trademarking a buzzword like SEO was clearly anti-competitive and the usual suspects in search lined up to oppose Gambert. One particular person named Rhea Drysdale stuck it out. Despite rapidly soaring legal costs, and several setbacks, Drysdale kept fighting Gambert’s application and won her case! On March 11, 2010, the United States Patent and Trademark Office terminated Gambert’s application for a trademark.

You can read Drysdale’s story here. – even if you are not into search, it is an inspiring story about young people getting active in public process.

Today, I am going to write about a topic that will especially interest people who have just started a web site.  The sandbox refers to a probationary period that all new sites must go through with major search engines.  I am writing about it because it is a topic that very few new webmasters know about it, despite the fact that it should play a huge role in how they plan and administer their web sites.Think of the sandbox effect as a probationary period in which major search engines don’t know whether to trust you or not.  While search engines will list you and return your URL in search results, they will not rank you highly for extremely competitive search terms.

Reginastreets.ca has only been online for twenty four days.  As such, we are firmly stuck in Google’s Sandbox.  When I login to Google Webmaster Tools (I promise to teach you how to use Webmaster Tools one day), I see that our URL is only actually returned on four searches!  My goal is to get Google to bring us thousands of people a month.  So, my goal is to get out of probation as quickly as possible…

So, what am I doing?  Basically, I am trying to be useful and I am trying to be part of a community.  Here are some strategies that I am using.

• We update frequently. Our goal is to give our readers at least one new piece of content every day.  If someone chooses to subscribe to our RSS feed, we owe that person something new every single day.  We hope that you find this useful.
• We link to good sites. Another one of our goals is to always use good sources.  Not only is this a tenet of good writing, it is also a tenet of good web design.  If Google sees that you link to good sites, it will assume that you are a good site.  If it sees that you link to garbage, it will conclude that you are garbage.  Good sites get out of the sandbox faster than bad ones!
• We use the reginastreets.ca whenever we can. I frequently hangout on the Joomla forums.  Not only are they a great place to learn more about using Joomla, they are also a great way to learn how to help people use technology.  However, this site gains from that forum as well.  You see, I put our URL in my signature on every post.  Not only does it give people a way to get in touch with me, it also shows search engines that our site is getting out there and putting content on other quality pages.
• We are keeping things stable. Our URLs all follow a pattern – they are all reginastreets.ca/date/title of the article.  That is a great format – not only does it give dates (which is useful for people and search engines), but it also gives the title (which is also useful for people and search engines).  But want to know something else?  We will definitely not change that format for the first year our site is in operation.  Try not to change the structure of your URLs and, if you have to, be prepared to spend more time in the sandbox!

Those are four solid strategies that you can use to minimize the amount of time you spend in the sandbox.  If you think about it, all of these strategies come down to trust.  When your site is new, your number one priority should be showing both your users and search engines that you can be trusted!  Best of luck with your sites!

Canopy - June 2009 Issue

While this site currently runs Wordpress only, we have some serious changes waiting in the wings.  What you see is a default templated version of one small section of the larger dream for reginastreets.ca.  My plan is to eventually adopt dual Content Management Systems (CMS) to run this site – the magazine will be run on Wordpress, but the rest of the site (the business directory, the event calendar, our Guide to Regina Downtown, and the associated Google Maps tie-ins) will run on a CMS called Joomla.  Complex?  Yes.  A cool experiment and learning experience?  Definitely.

I know much more about Joomla than I know about Wordpress and the Joomla forum is one of my serious online hangouts.  Joomla was actually a big factor in the formation of my open source for non-profits concept, but that is another topic for another time.  A very interesting topic came up in the Joomla forum and this article was born moments after reading it.The forum post in question started as a question about title tag conventions and morphed into a discussion of keyword research.  Since keyword research is one of my favourite subjects, I decided to turn those few posts into a more substantial article.

For the purposes of this article, we are going to restrict our access to Google.  Google is the biggest search engine out there and it is also, in my mind, the absolute best.  While it is quirky (see the hidden meaning behind the phrase ‘Google Voodoo’?), it is also dead accurate (most of the time).  As such, it is a good place to start – great results in Google can easily turn into great results in other engines!.

Google provides three really great tools for keyword research.  They are Google Adsense, Google Insights for Search, and Google Trends.  Each is a little bit different and I will briefly cover each in this post.  Additionally, while each uses the same data, they also reach different conclusions and provide slightly different recommendations.  It is always wise to consult as many data sources as possible.

Finally, in our examples, we are going to use the keyword, “child poverty”.  You can use these methods on any keyword you like.

Google Adwords

Google’s famous cost per click advertising vessel comes pre-equipped with a powerful tool for keyword research.  See the screenshot below for an idea of some of the information you can get from Adwords.

Google Adwords Screen shot - Child Poverty

As you can see, Google Adwords is a great place to start.  It also gives you a good idea of how many people search for a certain term.  Finally, it is a great tool to generate some more ideas for keywords – without this, I might not have thought about targeting my content towards the term ‘child poverty statistics’.

Google Trends:

With keyword ideas in mind, your next step should be Google Trends.  Google Trends gives you several key pieces of information – it shows you historical trends in search volumes, as well as what parts of the world search the most for certain keywords.

Child Poverty - Google Trends Graph

If you scroll a little bit further down the results page, you will get a chance to see geographical information on search popularlity.  Trends gives you a chance to look at what parts of the world search for a particular term the most.  As this picture shows, that information is broken down by country and by city:

Google Trends Shows What Parts of the World Search for a Particular Term the Most

Furthermore, Google Trends lets you analyze the trends in a particular region of the world.  This graph shows search volumes for the term, “child poverty” in Canada:

Search volumes for "child poverty" in Canada

With Google Trends and the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool in your arsenal, you can make an informed choice when it comes to targeting Google traffic.  These tools can give you an idea of how many people regularly search for a particular term.  They will also show you if people’s searches follow a particular pattern.  For example, are volumes going down?  Do they follow a regular pattern?  Or are they on the upswing?

Moreover, these tools can be useful for brainstorming and getting new ideas for keywords to target.  Sometimes, getting people to your non-profit (or other) site can be as simple as changing the words you regularly use in your titles and your content.

However, if you wish to push your research into another level, you have access to Google’s most advanced tool – Insights for Search.

Google Insights For Search

If you want to dig really deep into a particular keyword, Insights for Search is going to become your absolute best friend.  However, before we dig into Insights for Search, I am going to warn you that the statistics you get from Insights For Search will not always match the statistics from Google Adwords and Google Trends.  In other words, no matter how proficient you get with it, do not use Insights for Search on its own – always validate the data with at least one or two other terms.

There is one other note – Google Insights for Search assigns a number to search volumes.  I think that too many statistics cause problems for beginners, so I prefer to encourage newcomers to look at these numbers as absolutes.  However, seasoned pros will want to know that they are not absolutes, that they are normalized to help show broad trends in search volumes for that particular keyword.  The idea is simple – the month with the highest search volume will be assigned a number of 100 and every other month will have its volume expressed in a percentage of the highest month.

Confusing, hey?  Look at it this way:

Let’s look at a nonsense search term – ‘ blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’.  100 people searched for that term in January 2007 – that was the highest volume ever.  In May 2009, only 80 people searched for that term.  May 2009 would be assigned a value of around 80 (80/100 = 80%).

To avoid getting too bogged down in those numbers, I encourage you to look at those numbers as absolutes, and to always focus on what appears to be the average.  For example, consider the Google Insights for Search report on ‘child poverty’:

Google Insights Graph of Child Poverty Searches

The highest volume was in Nov. 2004.

If you look carefully (and run your mouse along the graph), you will notice that the graph follows a fairly regular pattern – it bottoms out every July and August.  It also reaches regular peaks in November and March/April of every year.  This graph is fairly predictable and the numbers are safe – people regularly search for child poverty so if you write good content about child poverty and properly promote it, you will get traffic to your site!

Finally, I think it is important to look at the ‘average’ of the data.  There is a scale on the right side of the graph – always look for sort of an average on that scale.  In the last graph I showed, I’d estimate that the ‘average’ is around 50 – 55.  Now, take a look at this graph, which shows the search volume for the term, ‘UNICEF’.

Searches for the term "UNICEF"

Take a look at recent results – their average has been between 20 – 40 for the last two years!  Clearly, a few months saw massive results – what happened in those months to spur that sort of search volume?  Can anything be learned?  Are certain terms falling out of popularity?

The point of this is that if you are going to invest time in a keyword, it is wise to make sure that that keyword will return results.  When given a choice between a few keywords, why would you devote your time towards those keywords that are getting 20% of their highest search volume?

Conclusions:

We have information from three sources, now let’s put it all together and analyze it.

“Child poverty” is an easy term to predict.  Canadian and world-wide results (from different sources) all follow a pretty stable pattern.  Results drop in July and August and reach their highs in November and March.  Moreover, traffic has been quite stable.  When compared to a term like UNICEF, child poverty’s traffic has not bottomed out.  Recently, it has been reaching 50-60% of its best ever traffic.  UNICEF, on the other hand, has recently been averaging around 20% of its best traffic.

The next steps, from a traffic point of view, are to analyze why these swings happened.  For example, why does search volume drop in July and August, but reach heights in November and March/April?  Is this a sign that traffic on child poverty normally comes out of school assignments?  And why has UNICEF experienced such an incredible swing since its high point?  What happened in January 2005 to create five times as much traffic as it receives now?  Or, is that term just terribly unpopular for political/cultural reasons?

Finally, I have shown you three tools and given you a few applications for these tools. Your challenge is to take that information and use it to figure out what kinds of words to use in your titles and opening paragraphs if you want to start getting consistent traffic from search engines. Next article I write on keyword research will take these numbers with some information on keyword difficulty and put it all into a spreadsheet. Then, we will use this spreadsheet to estimate traffic and to generate a metric to help you decide what keywords to target.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask….

The RSM is a street publication, founded in the tradition of great street publications like the Nashville Contributor and the Edmonton’s Our Voice.  I helped start the magazine and remain heavily involved – I write articles, edit articles do the layouts and work with/recruit our vendors.  So, once again, why am I writing about search engines?I have always pictured myself working with non-profit organizations, especially those that are involved in the publishing industry.  And this series, which I affectionately refer to as ‘open source activism’ is the first step in what I hope will be a career of service.  My goal is to educate and support – to help non-profits take their first steps into the internet and to stand behind them to assist them with any issues that they may encounter.

So, what does that have to do with search engine optimization?

Search should be the first thing you think about when you plan a website.  Google is unbelievably powerful – if you build your site properly, Google will introduce you to the world.  But too many people do not build their site properly and they sit back and wonder why nobody comes..

Over the weeks and months to come, I hope to introduce all aspects of search optimization – from the simple to the difficult.  I also hope to answer some questions, walk people through some open source tools and give you enough information to start your own ‘publishing company’.

Be peaceful.G

So what does this have to do with search engines?Good titles are incredibly important if you want to have any kind of success with search engines.  Of all the html tags (I will talk more about html in a later article), the <title> tag is by far the most powerful tool in a search marketer’s arsenal.  That makes sense though, doesn’t it?  Would you look for a chocolate chip cookie recipe in a book entitled, “The Quantum Universe”?  

Search engines are also remarkably democratic – if a good site links to your site, search engines will determine that your site is good too.  In that way, links are like votes, though the votes are not necessarily evenly distributed.  Again though, this makes sense.  Let’s say that you were really interested in learning about chocolate chip cookies.  Whose opinion would you trust more?  A master chef’s, or a guy named Greg’s?  If an authority in your field links to your site, search engines take that as an endorsement.

Finally, comes the content.  Content is something of a double edged sword.  First, research suggests that search engines (especially Google) have some very advanced semantic analysis software which actually grades content based upon words used, reading difficulty, and various other patterns.  The theory is that sites that follow the patterns set out by trusted sites are more likely to be trusted (and thus ranked higher).  Second, if you write consistently good content, people will link to you and more links always equal higher search engine results!

That concludes the second article in my series on Google Voodoo – keep watching this spot or subscribe to our RSS feed to keep reading.  And remember, if you like this article, the biggest compliment you can pay me is to link to it.  (or comment)

Peace.G

This post is both a culmination and a beginning.  The culmination of months of dreaming and planning and the beginning of (hopefully years) worth of material.  The last few weeks have had rather similar impacts upon the world of search, so that is where I will begin.  Search engines fascinate me.  How can you type words into a big, stupid computer and get directed to sites that will teach you more about those words?  For example, if I go to google.ca and type in ‘Regina’, I find that the first three entries are the Google Maps entry, the City of Regina home page and the city’s Wikipedia entry.  I am into learning about how those three sites got to the top of that list.

Smart people call that ’search engine optimization’ and those with eyes towards branding like to brandiis the acronym ‘S.E.O.’.  I think that search optimization lies somewhere between applied linguistics, an exercise in statistics, chess and voodoo.  Sounds difficult, doesn’t it?

If taken to extremes, it can be, but I like to keep things simple.  Search optimization is the art of relevance.  It is the art of designing content in such a way that search engines will deem it worthy.  And, the best way to design content for a search engine is to learn to think like a search engine.  The best way to do that is with an analogy.

Imagine for  a moment that you are writing a research project in a huge, poorly indexed library.  How would you find the books you needed to write that paper?  You would likely look at titles, ask people you trust, and flip through books to see if the content interests you and has the topics you are looking for.  And that, my friends, is ultimately how search engines work.

That was more teaser than introduction, but I hope it taught you something.  If you would like to learn more, keep watching this space or subscribe to our RSS feed.  Best of luck.