Use Google Trends to your advantage

I’m sometimes in doubt about the correct keyword that I have to use in an article. This happened for instance in the past when I was writing about hard drives, or hard disks. I was not sure if I should use hard drives or hard disks in the article. Using both in the same article was out of question so I had to make a decision.

Instead of rolling some dices I decided to use Google Trends to take a look at the search volume for both terms and pick the term that would have a higher search volume. The higher search volume might not always be the best pick because it means usually that the competition is also using that term in favor of a lesser searched one.

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Do small sites profit from Spotplex ?

Spotplex is a relative new service that indexes articles from websites that have a small javascript implemented. So what does it do ? It ranks articles based on their views on the writers website which puts websites with many visitors in a natural advantage and small sites at a natural disadvantage. Popular articles, that is articles with the most views are shown in prominent places on Spotplex while articles of smaller sites make it rarely to those places.

They can still be found by searching for tags but I suppose the effect on traffic is not that enormous. Does it make sense for small sites to implement the javascript code from Spotplex at all ? Let me answer it this way. I don’t think it would harm the site in any way which means: yes, do it. Even if you receive a few hits per day it is worth the implementation. It will grow more with your site growing and with Spotplex becoming more popular in the long run.

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Use Onlywire to drive traffic to your site

Onlywire is a service that was introduced to me by a friend. It lets you create a wonderful bookmarklet that when pressed submits the active page to more than a dozen social bookmarking sites including del.icio.us, furl and diigo. Before I knew of this bookmarklet I submitted my articles only occasionally to social bookmarking sites. With onlywire I do it for every article because it is a fast and easy process.

You only have to supply the tags by yourself, everything else is done by onlywire. You do need accounts at the various sites however but this is done in about 30 minutes and you are logged in automatically using the onlywire service from then on.

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