I’ve been meaning to start a Weekly SEO round up for a while now, and today is as good a day as any. Each week I’ll try to talk about the latest updates from Google and the other search engines, as well as share with you some insights we’ve gleaned from our Analytics over the past week.
News from the Internet and Search Engines
Social Search - Well, this happened over a week ago but it’s worth mentioning. Google announced its new social search feature that will help you find relevant results to your searches from friends, family, and your extended social circle (friends of friends). It’s still in the testing phases, you can opt in by visiting Google lab's experiment page and turning the feature on. Keep in mind that without much adoption by users who are your friends, you won’t see much of a difference in your search results. I think that in the near future this is where search is heading so it’s a good idea to test the waters and see what kind of difference it makes for you. You can read more about this announcement on Google’s official blog
Non-Latin Characters in Domain Names - This news won’t likely have much impact on your business, however, it’s good to stay up to date on the latest rules on the net. Up until now, Non-Latin characters haven’t been allowed in domain names. ICANN has moved to allow non-Latin characters in domains , currently only governments will be able to use non-Latin characters but expect to see this more widely adopted soon. With the increasing adoption of the internet in China, I expect to see a large portion of the internet use Chinese characters in domain names in then next few years.
Insights from the past weeks searches
Brand Yourself – Your username is your brand, we consistently see some usernames in the top keywords referring people to ArtFire. We call this type of search a navigational search, the searcher knows what they are looking for and uses a search engine to go there (as an example, many people Google “ebay” just to go to ebay.com, they aren’t looking for anything else). The members who’s usernames are referring keywords have successfully built their brand with their customers who remember their name and specifically visit their studio again. If you’re looking for more information about building your personal brand I cover some aspects in my SEO Beyond ArtFire guide.
Popular Culture significantly influences search traffic – The “Where the Wild Things Are” movie, along with Halloween, sparked searches for costumes related to characters in the story. This trend went hot in October. In total over 7000 people visited ArtFire using over 1000 different keyword searches all directly related to this one trend. Regardless of how you feel about Pop Culture and its influence, as a business person this data should make you sit up and take notice.
Christmas is getting more searches than Thanksgiving, a lot more – Searches related to Thanksgiving will probably pick up in the next two weeks, but they are currently dwarfed by searches relating to Christmas by a factor of 10. Another thing to keep in mind, people use the term “Christmas” a lot when searching for Christmas related items. If you have an item that is specifically for Christmas like décor or cards, make sure you say so in the title and description of that item.
Thats all for this week, thank you and good luck!
Posted: 2 Week(s) Ago | 
