Google Keeps Rolling With New Tools to Play With

7 Aug, 2008 Articles

Once again Google takes another stride in keeping several steps ahead of its competition with releasing another nice new tool to play with - Google Insight - but more of that later. I wanted to do this post because I have become increasingly impressed by the development guys over at Google and their constant tweaking and updating of old favourite online tools to help make life more easier for webmasters, online business owners and marketers alike.

Webmaster Tools

I’ve been meaning to do a post on Webmaster Tools for over a year now and even started a PDF guide which perhaps one day I’ll eventually get finished. For me, and this is a personal opinion, I really like webmaster tools although I do get frustrated with it from time to time … but, anyway, if your into viewing your internal links and you use Firefox then a good extension to use is Joost de Valk’s, SEO Link Analysis Extension (It’ll show the anchor text, the pr of the page and if its a clean link, nofollowed or has been removed since Google cached the page the link was on).

The Top Search Queries are more consistent now with the data its showing - I used to find that it would have me pinpointed in 1 position for a certain search term and upon an actual physical search I’d be way off the mark. Also liking the Diagnostics > Content Analysis for showing duplicate Titles or poor Description tags - handy if your running a blog. Finally, I’d like Google to implement a search against a specified datacentre for a keyword related against your site and also show the number of searches per month much like they have done with their AdWords Keyword Tool but more specific in the data it returns - now having this feature in Google webmaster tools would be like Christmas.

Google Insight

Google’s latest marketing toy, designed to give you a an all-round view for a search term by region, sub-region, date and category - as Google explain :

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

So doing a search for ‘SEO‘ filtered by United Kingdom and the year as 2008 brings some interesting data.

The graph below shows a drop off for the keyword ‘SEO’ within the UK’s index, summer holidays perhaps has a lot to do with this or even the current economic climate?

The regional settings within the UK as well is also interesting : England come out top but Northern Ireland not even a sniff - mmm, I’m sure they’ll be a few companies across the water who’ll dispute that.

Also Google Insight is good for showing top search terms related to SEO but its the up and coming keywords that I’m more interested in - wonder why the term highlighted below is becoming so popular - swings and roundabouts eh?