Since I am really interested in Search Engine Optimization, Analytics, and have recently tried Google Adwords on this site, I wanted to dedicate a post to these high CPC Keywords lists that are all over the internet. I’m not going to lie, when I first saw a list of most expensive Google keywords a few years ago, I got excited at the idea of monetizing that content. I expected high competition for these keywords but having a good understanding of SEO, I still thought that I could compete and make some money using these lists. Ofcourse, I was wrong, simply because a list of high CPC keywords in Adwords does not translate to money made from impressions and clicks on a web page.
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Since the Google search engine is dominating the internet search market, statistical data about search keywords can be very insightful. I was amazed when I first discovered Google Trends and I still think that it is a very powerful tool for marketers, researchers, website owners, and SEO experts. The tool has expanded quite a bit over the years and now you can do much more than just see the top 10 most popular keywords. Apart from viewing the latest hot searches and the most popular phrases over the last month, you can now see these top keyword trends in a cool visualization. If you select specific keywords, you can compare and chart up to 5 keywords over time and see the top and rising related searches. You can even filter by location, time, category, and type of search (web, image, news, shopping, or YouTube) or compare keywords by location or time range.
Adding to this, Google has added Top Charts which shows you most searched and trending keywords per category and you can filter or segment the data based on any time in the past. There is a ton that you can do with this data but isn’t it really annoying that there is no official Google Trends API? We do have the hot trends atom feed and that gives you 20 trends with approximate traffic numbers and related news items. This would be good for building a little widget but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of serious keyword and market analysis. So, today, I will dig in, sniff some network traffic and figure out what kind of calls are made between the browser and Google servers to provide this trending keyword data programatically.
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JavaScript templating frameworks are gaining a lot of popularity these days. Client-side templating comes with many benefits: performance, clean separation of data and presentation tier, browser and/or CDN html caching, and much more like maximizing code reusability and maintainability. This is a great introduction on JavaScript templates. But, how do they affect search engine optimization? Today, I will dig into JavaScript templating frameworks, talk about some new players, discuss comparisons and benchmarks, and address the question of front-end templating and SEO.
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I was thinking about misspellings recently and wanted to put together a small PHP script that will generate typos from a given word. The idea is based around typos being generated based on proximity of other letters or numbers next to the correct character on a keyboard. There are other ways to think about misspellings, but it makes sense that most typos occur as a result of a user accidentally pressing the wrong key. So, we just create an array for each key, which has all the surrounding keys, and then use these arrays in a loop which replaces characters in a string with other characters that are close in proximity on the keyboard.
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