With all this rolling around in my head I am always amazed to watch people search the web. Take the election news of the past week, you can bet that a lot of people will type McCainPalin.com into a search engine. My guess is that someone just bought some domains and took a guess that McCain would pick Palin as his VP. But this choice could pay for a lot of specualtion that was wrong. If you go to McCainPalin.com it is basically a one page site with an ad at the top. I would love to know what the traffic has been on this site so far.

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A quick trick that can help with quickly knowing what time it is somewhere else is using Google to show you the current time anywhere in the world.

It has been reported that Time: is an “advanced operator”, although it is not listed on the Advanced Google Search Operators page.

I have found that you can simply enter the word Time followed by any location. If your search term is not specific enough to return only one time zone, it will give you all available time zones.

A query for Time United States, will show you all time zones in the U.S.

Some countries obviously have only one time zone and in that case it is easy to get the results you need for any city in that country, such as Time Italy returns.

So now you can always know the current time quickly.

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One thing I realized recently was that most of my search traffic comes from my older posts. However, I found myself doing the same thing as a lot of other bloggers, placing my contextual ads on pages and not considering these facts about who is visiting the pages.

Typically I would place contextual ads on most of my blog pages except for the home page, thinking that the loyal readers visited the home page and did not want to have those ads in their way. After taking a fresh look I discovered that was not the case.

The reality is most of the readers on a blog that are loyal readers read a post when it is fairly new, probably within the first 48 hours of it’s life cycle. So instead of placing ads based on pages, maybe it would make more sense to base them on time. I have changed my contextual ads due to this data, these ads will now show up on pages after 48 hours.

The idea is simple, keep it clean for the benefit of my loyal readers, while still taking advantage of the long tail search traffic.

Let’s see what happens!

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And I will admit that Redneck Google (also known as Hoogle) looks to have a little more technology than either of the Gothic or Emo pages. Each of those pages are simply a cover page that leads to regular Google results using a Google Custom Search Engines.

Redneck Google is actually a translator page that converts your normal search terms into a Redneck version with links to valid search results. Pretty impressive for a bunch of Rednecks ! Looking through the results it is obvious that this site has actually done their research and truly understand what Redneck means.

Note : Currently GooGoth (Gothic Google) is returning errors.

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Looking at Trends today made me realize you could easily make a menu for a Holiday from the results.

Just look at the list of food on the page today and you can easily see what people are making for their Easter lunch or dinner.

• deviled eggs
• hard boiled eggs
• green bean casserole
• ham glaze
• bunny cake
• au gratin potatoes
• jello eggs
• resurrection cookies
• baked ham
• cheesy potatoes
• broccoli casserole
• potato salad
• ham recipe
• corn casserole
• wine with ham
• ambrosia salad
• egg casserole
• pineapple stuffing

I would be curious to hear how traffic spikes for people with Food sites on a weekend like this?

Link : Google Trends

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…offers you a way to get your web site onto the first page of Google and other search engines guaranteed!…

I have not seen a guarantee for search engine placement in some time and I was hoping that people were not still falling for this. There is no way anyone can guarantee you that they can put your website on the first page of Google or any other top search engine. Yeah, they might be able to get a site listed for a term and actually get it on the first page, but to guarantee it is just crazy. Please do not fall for this.

Just think logically, even if they were that good, and everyone jumped on this program, there is only so much room at the top. If they signed up 500 sites for a term, how can they squeeze all those sites unto the top page, the print would be really small, lol.

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Do you really look at your statistics?

I am always amazed when people tell me they really study their own blog and statistics. Then I will ask them what their Top Landing Page is, or what is the top keyword phrase used to find them. Invariably I get a little silence followed by something like, well uh, I THINK this….or I THINK that…..

Don’t think, KNOW. Any good stats package will give you the information, it is up to you to decipher it. And when you really look at it, there is always something to learn, especially in “How” people came to your site. If you are going after a keyword or keyword phrase is it working? Are people finding your site with those terms? And more importantly, what combinations did they use to find you that you did not plan on?

There are 3 parts to the equation.

• What you think will happen.
• What you planned to happen.
• What really happened.

I can not tell you how many times I thought of an article I wanted to write, I had a great title and keyword phrase to help draw attention to it. I wrote the post, and the traffic started flowing. However, I discover that although my thoughtful keyword phrase was a good target, more people found me with a phrase that I did not specifically plan.

We tend to get caught up in thinking that everyone searches the same, and nothing could be farther from the truth. So, Read Your Own Blog, maybe you will see something that you did not see when you were writing it.

And ask yourself this !!

Would you subscribe to your blog?

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There has been some mention of this in the past, but this appears to be the first “experimental” release.

I tried it immediately and was very impressed with the interface and response.

And it’s free. Google doesn’t charge you a thing for the call or for connecting you to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, based on your telephone service provider.

Note: Google Voice Local Search is still in its experimental stage. It may not be available at all times and may not work for all users. We’re fine-tuning the service to get better at recognizing your requests. It’s currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings. Source : Google Voice Local Search

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One of the reasons I have become such a huge fan of the Google AJAX Search API is because it lets you see more than just one type of result. After about the Top 10 results most searches can get a little redundant, and if the engine you are using is trusted by you, do you really go way down the list to read? Or, do you start picking off the top results and begin a little CAADD (Computer Aided Attention Deficit Disorder) activity. You know, you read one post which leads you to another source and so on. You never really get back to that long list of results.

So instead of getting 100 results from Blogs, how about getting the top 8 (everyone wishes it was 10) results from Google BlogSearch, Google, Google News and any other sources you want to program in. And as an extra bonus, you get a group of Videos that will play right on the page without requiring a reload or move off of the page.

I took 15 minutes to put together a sample page to demonstrate. Let’s use Robert’s search term “videobloggingweek2007“, just click to give it a try and see what you think.

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