• Paid Search / PPC (Google Search Network)
• Paid Search / PPC (Google Content Network)
• Organic Search / SEO (Google Search Engine Optimization)

Plan/Create Google SEO & Adwords PPC

Use Insights for Search, Keyword Tool, Search-based Keyword Tool, Traffic Estimator, Ad Planner, Display Ad Builder, Related Searches, Wonder Wheel, and Adwords Editor to create your search engine marketing plan.

Place/Target Google SEO & Adwords PPC

Use Conversion Optimizer, Bid Simulator, Ad Preview Tool, Placement Tool, Site Exclusion Tool, Location Targeting and Language Targeting Settings, and Ad Scheduling to target to your audience.

Measure/Track Google SEO & Adwords PPC

Use Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics to track your ROI, Website Optimizer to improve conversion rate of your website, and Google Webmaster Tools to find and troubleshoot issues of your website.

Google listed most of the above mentioned tools under the Agency Toolkit page in which you can find the brief introductions of the tools.

Google Blogoscoped’s blog post shows you where to find Google’s Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel appears on Google.cn within the side bar that expands to the left.

For example, my core keyword is “English” (in Chinese) which I have entered into Google’s web search. Google’s Wonder Wheel shows a clickable flash-based image with your core keyword in the center and related keywords around the core keyword.

When I click on one of the related keywords “English Learning” (in Chinese), this keyword gets moved to the center and becomes the new core keyword. It creates a newly connected circle for “English Learning” with new related keywords around this new core keyword.

You can build up your Chinese keyword lists by exploring all the related keywords surrounding the core keywords.

PPC Hero shows you exactly how to use Google’s Wonder Wheel and Related Searches for keyword research.

Your website’s content may only be in one language (e.g. English), but your visitors’ may prefer to read your content in their own mother tongue languages. Translating your website’s content into multiple languages manually can be expensive and complicated. Google Website Translator Gadget supports the automatic translation of your site’s content in 51 languages and is a Javascript/client-based tool that operates within visitors’ browsers.

Google Website Translator Gadget detects the language of your web page and the browser settings of your visitor.

• If your visitors’ language is different from the language of your page, they will be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language
• If your visitors’ language is the same as the language of your web page, no translation banner will appear

The installation of Google Website Translator Gadget requires only the insertion of the code snippet onto your site’s pages. As long as the code snippet is placed within the BODY section of your site’s pages, you can customize the placement of Google Website Translator Gadget.

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=swine+flu

Google Insights for Search shows you the search volume of “swine flu” has rose sharply after mid-April:

Some smart PPC marketers have been taking the unusual seasonality as an opportunity to sell swine flu related products or services:

Before launching a seasonal campaign on Google Adwords, you should create your swine flu related keyword lists via some of the SEM keyword research tools by using the following keywords as a research base:

Swine Flu
Swine Flu Mask
Anti-Swine Flu Kit
Swine Flu Protection Kit
H1N1

If you are focusing in the Chinese market, Baidu provides an equivalent tool called Baidu Index in which you can see similar rise of searches for swine flu (zhu-liu-gan in Chinese Pinyin):

Baidu Index also shows you the attention rates of swine flu from both the Baidu users and journalists:

• News Search, Image Search or Product Search as opposed to only Web Search
• Categories
• Metros for the United States

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. This analysis indicates the likelihood of a random user to search for a particular search term from a certain location at a certain time. Keep in mind that Insights designates a certain threshold of traffic for search terms, so that those with low volume won’t appear.

To illustrate how you can use Insights for Search, let us look at how Walmart did between November and December in the past couple of years. From the graph below, you can see how Walmart’s growth in the past several years as well as when exactly the traffic peaks occurred.

Insights for Search gives you news that were related to Walmart during the period of your choice.

Insights for Search’s Top Searches and Rising Searches are new keyword ideas and also show you:

• Walmart’s major competitors such as Target, Best Buy, Kmart, Sears, and Circuit City
• Walmart’s mostly searched item on Google is Wii
• Google users look for toys on Walmart
• For Black Friday shopping, Google users shop on Walmart

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.

Rising searches highlight searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. So if you’re comparing data for a search term during 2006, the time period serving as the basis of comparison is 2005. Similarly, if you’re comparing searches for that term during May of 2006, the basis of comparison is April of 2006.

You can compare up to five search terms or groupings at one time, with up to 25 search terms in each grouping (use the plus sign to create a grouping). Click + Add search term to add a search term or a grouping; to remove a search term, click the x next to it.

Here’s an example:

pen + pencil + paper (grouping 1)
stapler + tape + notebook + ruler (grouping 2)
eraser + paper clip (grouping 3)

By looking at data from Regional Interest, you can prioritize your focus on your regional geo-targeted Adwords campaigns.

Google Insights for Search also associates Walmart to the categories below:

• Shopping
• Local
• Computers & Electronics
• Games
• Lifestyles
• Entertainment

This tells you the categories and products you should focus on.

Signing into your Google account allows you to download the data to spreadsheets (CSV files) and makes numerical values of graphs, rising searches, and top searches available to you. Also, only after you download the data to CSV files, you will be able to see more than the top 10 searches and rising searches.

Here are other examples on how you can use Google Insights for Search.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery collects keyword data from over 200 search engines in the world and has the largest keyword database that contains over 36 billion searches. Keyword Discovery also offers language specific keyword databases collected from regional search engines.

To get the keywords, you need to sign up for either Keyword Discovery’s free membership or paid membership. With the free membership, you get the top 10 keywords that are of the highest search volume. With the paid membership, you can choose to get the top 1,000, the top 10,000, or the entire keyword list. Each keyword list is priced differently and all the data is being updated regularly.

Google Keyword Tool

Google provides a free keyword research tool called Google Keyword Tool which shows you search volume keyword data of the previous month, average search volume of the past 12 months, and advertiser competitions.

Google Search-based Keyword Tool

Google search-based keyword tool gives you new keyword suggestions that are:

• Not currently in your Adwords account
• Based on the actual search queries on Google
• Matched to specific web pages of your site

Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to compare up to 5 topics (or keywords) and see how often they have been searched on Google over time, with geographic regions in comparison.

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search allows you compare search volume patterns of (topics or) keywords across specific regions and time frames. It shows you the search terms and rising searches related to the topics you have chosen.

MSN adLab Search Funnels and Demographics Prediction

Find out search sequences of users from Microsoft’s Search Funnels. For instance, it can show you how many people search for BMW and then search for Mercedes Benz, Audi, and other automobiles.

Demographics Prediction predicts age, gender, and other demographic information of users. It is based on online behavior of users such as queries they search online and websites they visit.

• Not currently in your Adwords account
• Based on the actual search queries on Google
• Matched to specific web pages of your site

The Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website’s content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The tool is also useful if you don’t currently advertise on AdWords. For example, a shoe store could discover which footwear styles users are searching for, or a digital camera blog could decide which cameras to review by looking at which camera models attract the most queries.

Signing in using your Adwords account login will allow you to view the full list of keywords customized to your web site.

At the moment, the Search-based Keyword Tool is only available to US and UK Adwords users.

There are a total 3 different experiments available. The other 2 experiments are “Keyword Suggestions” (similar to Yahoo’s search assist) and “Alternate Views for Search Results”. You can only join any one of the 3 experiments at a time, but you can simply disable one experiment and then enable the other one right away.

Hong Kong as one of the major cities of China (in which it was re-acquired from the British in 1997) does not have much details on this version of Google maps. Rather I expect Google to later release the Hong Kong version of maps. It will make more sense, as Hong Kong’s Chinese language has always been in the Traditional fonts while the rest of Mainland China is using the Simplified fonts.

A link has been added to the Google China (Guge) homepage alongside the existing links such as web search, images, and news.

I expect this new Chinese Simplified version of Google maps will become much more popular than its Standard English version, as the majority of Chinese users still prefer using services of their own language.

Search Mash possesses a mix of Google Web Search and Google Image Search as well as some interesting features such as that you can rearrange the order of the search results by dragging and dropping.

This is what it says on the Search Mash site:

SearchMash lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Check out our features page from time to time to see what has changed, and also to tell us which ones are useful to you.

SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc.

Information that we collect through SearchMash will only be used to evaluate, research, and analyze the ideas and features offered on the site.

It would be interesting to see how Google grows Search Mash. One possibility is that Google is collecting searcher behaviour data to improve relevancy of search results. The other possibility is that Google will launch a personalized search engine based on the features of Search Mash.

Google Trends is a tool that shows you what people are searching on Google. Besides the typical search box, Google Trends groups similar searches to one text link, such as coffee and tea, two Chinese female celebrities, and more. When you click on one of those links, you will be taken to a chart which compares the volume of searches.

According to Google, in addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by search algorithms of Google, Accessible Search further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. In short, Google Accessible Search prioritizes search results in terms of their usability.

Sites that are ranked well with Accessible Search have few visual images, are simply designed and, will at least read well without images.

Here is a simple test. A search for “Microsoft” on Google main search ranks Microsoft.com as the first result, while the same search on Accessible Search lists Microsoft as the third result. The first and second results are Wikipedia’s Microsoft page and MSN.com respectively.

Google Gmail changed it all. After its initial announcement, many existing web mail services including Google’s major rivals Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail increased their storage capacity. Hotmail initially went from 2MB to 25MB and then to 250MB. Yahoo! Mail initially went from 4MB to 100MB and in April 2005 it went to 1GB. These were all tactical moves to stop existing users from switching to Gmail.

The major innovation of Google Gmail is its method of categorizing emails (or conversations). Gmail keeps track of individual conversations, which consists of the original message and all the replies to that message, as one long thread.

In Gmail, you can categorize your emails by giving them labels. Unlike traditional email services in which an email can only be assigned to one folder, Gmail allows an email to fall under multiple labels. Filters can also be set up to have incoming emails labeled automatically.

Gmail has a default auto save feature to avoid the loss of your unfinished message in case of a browser crash.

The Gmail Chat feature was later added to Gmail which allows you to chat with other people who have Gmail accounts. Gmail Chat enables users to connect to the Google Talk network on computers that do not have the Google Talk client installed. Gmail Chat also keeps an archive of chats in your Gmail account.

You can even check your Gmail account through other Google products:

• Google Toolbar: Just add the Gmail custom button to the Toolbar.
• Google Personalized Home Page: Add the Gmail module to your personalized page.
• Google Talk: Every time you receive an email, you will be notified in the system tray.
• Google Desktop: Simply enable the sidebar view. You can also create alerts and filter your emails. Desktop can also index your emails to search it offline.

The good side about Google Spreadsheet is that it provides user the flexibility to edit the spreadsheet from anywhere and to share the spreadsheet online. It has built-in formulas from basic to over medium levels such as financial formula like PMT(), data lookup function such as VLOOKUP() and TRANSPOSE(), and text data manipulation forumulas like REPLACE() and PROPER(). It also provides users the capabilities to freeze rows, sort columns, insert and delete cells, wrap texts, and create multiple sheets.

The bad news is that Google Spreadsheet is very basic comparing to Microsoft Excel. It currently does not have charts and pivot tables. However, I speculate it is a matter of time that Google Spreadsheet gets improved and monetized by the inclusion of Google PPC text ads.

Try Google Spreadsheet through Google Docs.