Google Insights – An Aid to a Successful Blog Post

November 3rd, 2009

Google Insights Logo

Last spring I came across Google Insights while I was working at EpikOne as a Web/Graphic Designer for the Spring semester. I used this for one of their projects to research currents trends that were developing among coffee, this was what the company was based around. I was using Google Insights to then gather information on current trends that were developing during a certain period of time and a set geography base for the search. After analyzing the data presented by Google Insights I took notes on the data given then worked that in to a new newsletter that was going to be sent out to a list of subscribers.

Lets cut to the chase, Google Insights can help you create a successful blog post because if you have an idea for a post in mind, send some keywords/phrases to insight. The interface of Google Insights is very simple, the landing page looks as follows:

Google Insights - InterfaceHere are some basics steps that I take when I want to use Google Insights to writing a successful blog post:

  • Think of a new blog post idea/thought to work with
  • Write down some keywords/phrases, that visitors might search for
  • Enter them in to Google Insights – If you need to add any filters (Area, Timeline, Country, etc)
  • The results for your keywords/phrases will be graphed out for you and also a map overlay showing popularity, also showing a graph of Interest over Time
  • See which keywords/phrases are doing the best, then work those around your up and coming blog post.

The simple tips above can help your blog post become more successful by analyzing what the current trends are relating to that one topic. Lets say I wanted to write an article about jQuery and AJAX, lets plug these in to Google Insights and see what it returns, below is an image that shows us Top Searches and Rising Searches.

google-insights-searchesGive this method a try out for yourself. Ponder up a new post idea, think of some keywords, plug them in to Google Insights, blow away, bring on the followers. This has become a common tool in my arsenal for blogging and designing. Great way to check if your blog post is running in to any current trends, that will lead in readers to your blog. Give this a try and see how it goes.

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Using images With Hidden Text For SEO

November 9th, 2008

Many of us, love to come up with images for our websites with a neat font that we want to use, but when we create an image with information on it, spiders can not render and index that information, therefore loss of effectiveness of the SEO on your website.  Regardless what is on the image there is a way to work with the browser to try to help the spider index the text still and keep your SEO rank in high places. Nothing is ever absolute with SEO but this is a technique that you can approach and try out. This approach enables you to describe the text in your image using the < h1 > tag without using display:none;

Sometimes people want to use:

h1{display:none;}

As a style, but you need to keep in mind that screen readers for the blind do not pick up text that has the property set to display:none;.  The code for this technique is as follows:

h1 {
  width: 100px; /* width of image */
  height: 0;
  overflow: hidden;
  padding-top: 100px; /* height of image here */
  background: url('your-image-path-here.gif') no-repeat
}

Then inside your HTML you could have something like:

Here is the text that describes my image that is used as the background image to this

Well you are probably thinking “well how does this work?” It is actually quite simple. The images will display within the element because you are setting the padding to the height of the image. Note, that the height is set to “0″ and overflow to hidden.

Using this technique you effectively hide text without turning off the display of the text.

So what do you think of this? Remember if you like this, bookmark this!

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Quick SEO tips

October 29th, 2008

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a very important aspect of any website.  You want the website to become visible to search engines for consumers to find and utilize your website. Below are some quick tips that you can do to improve your search engine visibility:

Google Analytics is a very strong and powerful tool used all over the world for SEO improvement. There have been books, documentation, seminars and classes based around GA. Find out where your users are coming from, what keywords, how long, the websites bounce rate and more.
The installation is very easy, Google will generate a code snippet for you, you copy/paste that code at the bottom of your page before the closing tag.

Google Webmaster Tools is also a great free resource to help Google index your website, you can manage sites and site maps using these tools. Another free and easy way to help Google index your website.

Geo Tags can be very important if you have your business localized, the tags for these include: geo.region, geo.position, geo.placename. Find your country subdivision code. To save you some time the, code for the United States is “US.” Examples of those geo tags would look like:

<meta name="geo.position" content="latitude; longitude">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Place Name">
<meta name="geo.region" content="Country Subdivision Code">

Your standard meta tags can range from, copyright, keywords, description, and language declaration, those can look something like what we have below. Make sure not to get too carried away with meta tags because that can also hurt you by increasing file loading time, stick with the basics. Keep the spiders happy and they will help you with your rank.  Remember also for the description meta tag keep it under 225 characters.

< meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2007-2008 www.ryancoughlin.com" />
<meta name="author" content="Ryan Coughlin" />
<meta name="description" content="Professional web site development and graphic designer serving the Kennebunk, Maine and Burlington, Vermont and the surrounding areas - Specializing in XHTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript" />

The title tag, I have been reading other articles and searching for more information and I have found, put “what you do” instead of “who is doing it” first so an example could be: “Professional Web Site Design Development and Graphics by Ryan Coughlin” vs. ryan coughlin – web and graphic designer: the portfolio of

Remember that text on the page holds more weight with indexing than alt text does, so try to keep the text on your site in HTML versus using text within an image.

With that round up, you have a few small SEO tips that you can take in too affect to use within your website and future clients. I plan on writing some more on the geo tags, but go in to much more detail on there use.

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