Sorry for the delay in the trends report but busy times are good times

Here at Arekibo we have found a lot of value in listening to what the web is saying and that’s why we want to share this information with you . So we will give you the search trends for the last 7 days. This information is valuable for anyone who wants to make sure they are informed and up to date with the latest news and well… the latest search trends.

The contents of this blog reflect the statistics gathered from Google Insight Search who is responsible for the facts and accuracy of the data presented herein.Pressing any of the trending keywords will open up Google Insights for Search where you can further analyze the data.

Worldwide:

Ireland:

UK:

So as you can tell.. The worldcup is the trending topic for this week… which is no suprise to us here… and i bet the trending topic for next week is how France is out of the worldcup !

After his presentation there was a Q&A session and we asked a question – “If we search for a term on Google.ie, what’s the difference between the search results returned from ‘the web’ and ‘pages from Ireland’ (remember were searching from the .ie domain).

Keeping in mind that Google has changed their homepage recently which resulted in localised search being harder to find and even though you visit the local domain (google.ie or google.co.uk etc) the default search results returned are from’the web’ and  ‘Pages from Ireland’ can sometimes be different.

Matt Cutts quickly answeredthat the Google search engine will automatically try to find the most related results based on the geographical location in the URL and he used the example of searching for the term “bank”. The results were when going to google.com Bank of America was first while in google.com.au the Australian Westpac bank would be the first returned etc. So in this example Google seems to localised results event though you don’t specify the  ‘the web’ and Pages from Ireland” option.

However

Try less popular terms and there are inconsistencies (try Seo Services or flu symptoms or banking advice etc) there are inconsistencies in the two results.

Google - the differences between web versus Pages from Ireland

Matt can you give us an answer why this is?

Finally to return to the recent changes in the search pages that Google have begun to test/rollout. When you offered the user the ability to  select where you would like Google to search from – ‘the web’ or ‘Pages from the Country’ it was clear that the search results would/could be different.

Google - Current UK homepage versus Ireland Homepage

So final question to Matt…Now that the option has been taken away from the homepage is there any need for a ‘the web’ and ‘Pages from Ireland’ if we are on the google.ie domain?

Finally Matt, thank you for taking the time out today to present to us all and for bringing the sun to Dublin.

1. Don’t just focus on visitor numbers – although it might be the main statistic that you were looking for, visitor statistics does not really mean much. More important are the new visitor statistics

2. High Bounce rates need attention – When your website is getting over 40% bounce rate it will mean that you are doing something wrong. You can dig deeper in the bounce rate statistics to see what pages on your website are getting a higher bounce rate. With that information you can adjust those bounced pages to make them more accessible for  your visitors.

3. Analise the keywords that bring the visitors – Often enough you notice that the keywords that are getting traffic to your website are not the ones that you initially optimized for. This can be because of a trending topic that you wrote about in your news or blog posts or because that perticular page is better optimized than the other ones.

4. Analise your referrals – When talking about referrals in Google Analytics we mean the inbound links that come in to your website, if you have many referals from a certain website you want to make sure that your new blog posts or news items are mentioned again on that referral site so you can increase visitor numbers even more.

5.Build on previous success- If you have a blog post ,news item or certain page that is doing much better then the rest of your website pages you might want to create a follow up post on it and also add some more links towards other posts within that hot topic page.

What is it exactly? SideWiki is browser add-on (for both IE and FF) that adds wiki-like functionality to virtually ANY existing page on the web.( I guess you know what Wikipedia is and what it’s for at this stage, so I’m not going to explain the purpose of that project). When you browse a page and this add-on is active, you can add your own notes to the page or its content, and the comments will be shared with other users (that installed the add-on, of course).

How does it work: I had a quick hands-on experience with the tool, and it’s pretty easy to configure (actually, you need no configuration to let it work). Once you start browsing, a “Side Wiki” button appears in your toolbar: by clicking it, a side panel will appear on the left. This panel contains all the comments left by other users and can be linked to any item in the page.

According to Google, the target of this add-on is to make sure  that users “see the most relevant entries first”. Some sort of SEO within the page itself ! Honestly, this is a great idea: it’s true that in many occasions you strive to find information you are looking for on the page… this is where this tool should come to the rescue.

Unfortunately, I reckon this won’t work as intended. Wikipedia itself , during its early days, has struggled to prevent junk content and spam from being added all over the place; to overcome this issue, they adopted the “moderation” model, where content is submitted, reviewed by authorised staff, and finally published or rejected. This is not the case with side wiki as there is no moderation (although you can report content)… and I’m afraid that spam and false information will be added to several pages. Actually, I’m more confident rather than afraid: I used sidewiki for a couple of hours… on Facebook’s homepage, for instance, there were (already) hundreds of spam messages totally irrelevant to the content. The feedback I’vefound on the web is generally positive in terms of functionality, but most of the users agree that this will become a spam tool.

The bottom line is: the tool is great and could be really helpful, but can we trust “ourselves”? Perhaps if some moderators were to be nominated…

Some of the Vendors reviewed include -

• Coremetrics: Online Analytics
• Google: Google Analytics
• Intellitracker: Intellitracker Enterprise R6
• Omniture: SiteCatalyst
• Yahoo!: Yahoo! Web Analytics
• WebTrends: Analytics 8.5
• AdMob: AdMob Mobile Analytics
• Visible Measures: VisibleSuite 209

A key finding of the report is that Yahoo! Web Analytics has surpassed Google in several key areas including:

• Better access control options and simpler approach to multi-site analytics
• Larger default monthly page-view limits (200MM vs. 5MM — unless you have an active AdWords campaign)
• Access to traffic data: Both vendors retain the right to hold and use your web analytics data for their own purposes, but only Yahoo! gives you the ability to export out your raw, unaggregated data
• Longer historical availability of reports and data

The Arekibo Web Analytics Team will be watching this trend to see if Google will make any amendments to Google Analytics to reflect this trend.