With Google unveiling a completely revamped Maps, now available to all, creating your own maps has become easier than ever. You can create private and public maps, share the maps with specific individuals, add descriptions to locations, and choose from several map styles and appearances.

The new Google Maps features makes map creation easier than ever, and with Google’s solid sharing settings, you have complete control over who sees the maps, who can add items to the maps, or if you prefer, you can simply keep the maps completely private.

Getting Started

After launching Google Maps, click on the settings icon and click on My Places.

That will open up the sidebar where you can add locations to your maps. In order to create maps with multiple layers, however, you need to click on Get advanced features with Maps Engine Lite. This will open up a new window with a new map.

With the latest Google Maps features, you’ll be able to add locations by searching for them on the map, add lines and shapes to your map, import data from CSV files, and organize and group locations in layers.

Clicking on the New Map button will open up a map where you can create layers, search for locations and more. An untitled layer will have already been created, and you can edit the layer, and rename it to whatever you want.

Add Locations to Your Map

Once you’ve renamed your map, and your untitled layer, search for a location and you can add locations to your layers. When you find the location you want to add, you can view extra details from Google Maps (exact location, phone number, website etc.) and you can add it to your layers by clicking the Add to Map link.

As you add more layers, make sure that you are inside the layer where you want it to be included. In addition to manually adding locations to your map, you can also import them. Imported data should be in a CSV or XLSX file, or you can also import a spreadsheet from your Google Drive.

 

So what kind of information do you need in the spreadsheet in order to actually import locations into your map? All you need are two columns with the addresses and names of the locations. When you import the locations, Google Maps will first ask you which column includes the addresses:

It will then ask you which column includes the names of the locations:

When you need to import the spreadsheet, you will have to enable popups the first time around in order to connect Google Maps to your Google Drive.

In addition to adding locations and personalizing the pins, you can also add lines to your map as well.

The lines can be used to show a specific path between locations. For example, if you want to create a map showing a specific itinerary which takes you from one location to the next. Lines don’t appear to have much in the way of customization options. We’d love to see the option to change colors and possibly even insert arrows which show the direction taken in the map.

Customize Your Map’s Appearance

When it comes to customizing the appearance of your map, you can also add personal touches to each location. You can change the icon and colour of the pins on your map.

At a glance, you can choose the regular map pin, circle, square, diamond and star. Clicking on the ‘More icons’ button will open up a ton of more options:

In addition to customizing pins, you can also change the overall appearance of the map, with nine themes to choose from. These themes are accessible by clicking Base Map.

Sharing Your Map

Once you’ve created your map, there are several ways you can share it. You can keep it entirely private if you’re creating a map for your own personal use. Any maps you create are private by default. If you’d rather share the map, you can share it with specific Google users, or you can share it publicly. Hit the green ‘Share’ button in the top right hand corner of the map:

When you click the “Share” button, you can access the share settings which are identical to share settings on any Google Drive document. You can make the map completely public, accessible only to anyone who has the link,or accessible only to specific Google users you invite to view the map.

Creative Uses

• While the typical tourist spots are easy to find in any city, you can use Google Maps to share tips and places to go with your followers and friends that they might not necessarily think of exploring otherwise.
• You can use Google Maps to create collaborative maps, making it easy for friends to organize a day trip or a holiday, by selecting locations you plan to visit.
• You can also use it for educational purposes – teachers can create maps and share them with students, to give them a visual resource of locations mapped out in Google. For example, a history teacher can use Google Maps to create a visual resource of Amelia Earhart’s final flight. There are some awesome historical Google Maps mashups that can give you a sense of just how much you can do with Google Maps as a history teacher.
• With citizen journalism using social networks, video sharing sites and more, why not add maps into the equation. For example, if you’re covering protests in a specific country, or even around the world, you can map out the locations of the protests on Google Maps.

Want more creative ideas on ways you can use Google Maps? Check out our list of 10 unique Google Maps mashups and the other 7 fascinating Google Maps mashups for a bit of inspiration.

Conclusion

Google Map’s latest revamp is pretty slick and makes creating collaborative and interactive maps easier than ever. There are a few features we’d still love to see – more customization, and adding more to the maps than just lines. But it’s definitely a huge step in the right direction.

What creative uses for Google Maps can you think of? Let us know in the comments

The Open source movement is playing a remarkable role in pushing technology and making it available to all. The success of Linux is also an example how open source can translate into a successful business model. Open source is pretty much mainstream now and in the coming years, it could have a major footprint across cutting edge educational technology and aerospace (think DIY drones).

Open source projects need all the help they can get. If not with funding, then with volunteers contributing to open source programming and free tools they can brandish. Search engines tuned with algorithms to find source code for programming projects are among the tools for the kit bag. While reusing code is a much debated topic in higher circles, they could be of help to beginner programmers and those trying to work their way through a coding logjam by cross-referencing their code. Here are six:

Ohloh

Ohloh Code says it is one of the largest and more comprehensive code search engines with more than 10+ billion lines of code indexed and updated FOSS software directories. We did give it a mention when Danny showed us how to enhance our coding skills by contributing to an Open source project. Ohloh is the upgraded face of Koders.com and is also freely available and freely editable by its community. It indexes all text files for search and has syntax highlighting support for 43 programming languages. The search query syntax supported by the service gives you the flexibility to search for different code classes. The search engine presently does not support regular expressions.

Krugle

Krugle is an open source search portal which taps into open source search repositories like Apache, JavaDocs, and SourceForge among others. You can search for code in C++, Java, Perl, Python, SQL, Ruby, XML, HTML etc.  It is powered by OpenSearch. Krugle also has an advanced search feature that can help you narrow down to the right APIs, libraries, sample code or documentation. From the results page, you can browse to the project developed with the code.

SearchCode

SearchCode sifts through 16 billion lines of open source code from code repositories like GitHub, BitBucket, CodePlex, SourceForge, Fedora and more. The code and documentation search engine is maintained by a single developer. You can use filters like file extensions, specific repo name and URL, regular expressions, and special characters. Specific examples and documentation search support is listed on the Examples page.

NerdyData

NerdyData.com is a spic ‘n span source code search engine that just had a limited launch. The site claims to have indexed over 140 million webpages for code. If you are a web developer, you will find it of interest because it searches for HTML markup, JavaScript code, or CSS style code snippets. But NerdyData aims to be more than a simple search engine for code as it also is trying to develop a whole list of features around the web development process.

You can also search for documentation; you can do a comparative search to visualize on how many domains a term appears; and you can do a competitor analysis by checking which websites have their code. NerdyData has a free basic plan which lets you do 200 credit searches. Each search feature has a credit score attached to it. You can check out the three pricing plans and try it out with the free features first.

Symbol Hound

Google and other search engines aren’t that good when it comes to searching with special symbols. Google for instance, strips away many punctuation marks and special symbols, if not all. Google does recognize some and here’s a list which you can refer to. So, searching with regular search engines might not return the desired output if you are searching for variable or error codes with special characters. Symbol Hound is an alternative search engine that can help here.

Merobase

Merobase is a different kind of search engine that helps you search and locate software components. Merobase does search for source code, but it also – and more importantly – can search for software components which are the discrete building blocks of software. It is a module that packages a set of functions. Component-Based Development (CBD) involves the creation of software from pre-written components. Merobase can search for interfaces with simple text based queries. You can also search with function-based, object-oriented, name-based, and test-driven queries. This abstract search method is a highlight of this engine. Merobase searches for components written in Java, C++, and C Sharp.

Are these the only six search engines for seeking out open source code? Well, they do seem to be the best. But if I have missed a blinder somewhere, do let us know in the comments. Searching for reputable source code on the web is one way of learning how to program well. Strange as it may sound, source code references could also be a social handshake with the person who created the code in the first place. The open source community thrives on collaboration. Do you find these alternative search engines useful or would you search within a particular code repository like Google Code, GitHub, or any platform specific repository only?

In my online work, I spend a lot of time examining what people are searching for on the Internet. I’m not the only one. We’ve always been into Google search here at MUO. We’ve offered everything from a cheat sheet of Google search shortcuts and tips, and help with getting search results for your site to look the way you want them to.

We’ve also closely watched the value of search results as Google has continually attempted to upgrade its algorithm. In 2012, Yaara felt that search results were much cleaner, while Justin offered up tips on how to extract links out of search results without all of the garbage in the URL string. There’s a lot about Google search results we like, and there’s a lot we still don’t like.

In fact, this year alone there have been multiple updates to the Google algorithm, code named “Panda” and “Penguin”. Cute names, but there’s nothing cute about the updates. Panda is all about ending the rule of content mills over the Internet, and Panda 1.0 did that in a big way in 2011. Penguin on the other hand, includes algorithm changes that were meant to specifically attack the old black hat SEO techniques - things like creating keyword stuffing links, low quality articles unrelated to the core site theme, and using exact match domains.

At this point, there have been over 25 Panda updates, with the latest reportedly occurring on July 18th. Some great websites we all know and love have suffered traffic loss, but at the same time, so have numerous content mills we’ve all grown to dislike. However, have all of these updates done the trick? Are Google search results as high quality as they should be after so many algo tweaks?  In this article, I’m going to take a close look at the results of three common search queries and see just how quality the results really are.

If you have a family, then you know that there are always those weekends that arrive where you haven’t made any plans at all. It’s probably one of the most common things for a family to turn to Google for some ideas of fun things to do. How good is Google’s search advice?

The good news is that the top 4 listings were top-quality sites you would expect to see, like Real Simple with a list of “11 fun things to do on a rainy day”, or The Simple Dollar with “100 things to do during a money free weekend”. They are well written articles that are well-organized and contain thoughtful and valuable ideas.  There were a few misses on the first 10 listings though, in my opinion. For example, “50 Fun Things to Do in an Elevator” on Meyerweb.

Nothing against Eric Meyer mind you. I mean, he’s well known in the web-design industry as a leader for web standards and CSS in particular. However, this particular page just contained nothing at all except 50 lines of ridiculous ideas like “make race car noises when anyone gets on or off”, or “One word: flatulence!”

Funny in a Ren and Stimpy kind of way, but is it honestly useful and valuable enough to be listed 6th in Google results for “fun things to do”?  The only thing the page has going for it is that the title had “Fun Things to Do” in the left-most position, as did the first sentence on the page. But wait, I though the new algorithm updates eradicated the ability for non-valuable pages to rank highly based on a few little page tweaks? Maybe not.

Even worse, the guy that registered “randomthingstodo.com” lists 5th, proving that the domain itself still holds a lot of power in the search algorithm. The site itself is a never ending crowdsourced list of things to do – most of which are completely useless comments like “Go to Petsmart and buy bird seed. Then ask the clerk how long it will take the birds to grow.” Subract 1 from the Google algorithm score.

Meanwhile, the poor family that’s trying to find fun things to do, is left spending most of Saturday morning and afternoon sifting through useless, rambling Google results.  On the upside, in later search listings, it does appear that the majority of results for this query are focused on local websites in different areas that happen to list fun things to do in that region. Score 1 for Google’s algorithm.

The majority of the highly-ranked sites were actually region-focused, which is interesting. It also appears that many of the top listings featured videos or slideshows, proving that it’s true that Google tends to value sites with more multimedia content as more valuable than sites that are text-only. This is usually a pretty safe assumption, most of the time. However, it also allowed a site that generally doesn’t write about topics like this — Bankrate.com, a financial website — to rank highly for this search phrase, because it offers a 10 page slideshow on the topic.

Conclusion for this search test – the bored family is going to struggle to find something to do, unless they log into their Google account so that Google can return region-specific search results based on the user’s actual location. Otherwise, they’ll be searching through useless listings for a long time.

Another topic that was notorious for content-mills to focus on are those evergreen “how-to” topics that people are always searching for online. How to fix a leaky faucet. How to install a bath tub. Things like that.  To test if things have improved over the last couple of years in this regard, I tried searching for something simple – “How to fix a flat tire”.

My thought here was that it would be nice to see the top 10-20 listings as highly-detailed articles or photographic how-to guides showing how you can take a flat tire off a car, locate the hole in the tire, patch it up yourself, and then re-install.  Unfortunately, what I found was that many content-mills still rule the day in the area of how-to topics like this.

In fact, WikiHow ranks first, probably because it has the ideal domain for how-to content, however the article that made it into first place for this search was completely useless.

It offered one stock photo near the intro, listed text-only instructions, and those instructions were basically how to install a purchased kit. The first step is “read the directions on the can of sealant you have brought.”  Horrid writing aside, why would a person even bother reading this article if they have a product with directions in front of them? The whole list was clearly written in haste, and only to attract search engine traffic to the site. Little to no value at all.

Fix-a-Flat ranks highly, as well as other sites that show how to use the Fix-a-Flat product. There’s one article from Instructables.com, a site that usually offers pretty good info. However, in this case it made me page through 10 pages (nice trick to bump up pageviews), only to discover the article wasn’t about “fixing” a flat, but about “changing” a flat.

Then there’s eHow, the content-mill we all know and love, listing 8th in the search listings.

As usually, Ehow just offers a stock image near the intro, and then 16 steps of text-only instructions meant to make a certain word count, with stupid steps like, “Apply the hand brake and put the transmission in park or in gear so the car won’t roll.”  Gee…thanks for warning me, or I would have parked my car and left it in Drive. Seriously? Google considers this to be worthy of 8th place on the first page of results?

Paging further down in Google Listings to try to find the actual useful articles on fixing flat tires, I spot Huffington Post. So, now Huffington is an authority on fixing flat tires? Well, not quite. Huffington posted a video titled “How to Fix a Flat Tire in Seven Minutes, From Lauren Fix”.   What was this amazing fix? Nothing more than using a Fix-a-Flat kit to get a flat tire rolling again.

It’s basically a one-and-a-half minute ad for Fix-A-Flat, and apparently Google feels this belongs up on page 3 of its listings.  Where did I finally learn how to fix a flat tire? Well, it was an embedded video on the blog HandyManFixHome.com. This was an 8 minute video that provided every detailed step, including all of the tools needed, to actually fully patch a flat tire using actual tools (not just a Fix-A-Flat spray).

Where was this useful result listed in Google’s search listing? Page 19.  It took me half an hour sifting through Fix-A-Flat ads and content-mill articles to finally find the useful blog and its embedded video, where the expert advised, “don’t rely on Fix-a-Flat, which is unreliable for large punctures”.

So far, my test searches have been very generic. For the next text, I decided to focus on a very fringe topic that few people would be covering, to see how well Google can turn up valuable results for even smaller niches like this.

Instructables and Mother Earth News actually had useful info on how to build a crossbow. Of course, there are the obligatory YouTube videos, now that Google owns YouTube…

I was disgusted to see WikiHow once again in the top listings – both number 5 and 6. However, taking a look at these articles, they were clearly written with a lot of effort and detail, and are definitely worthy of a high listing.

The instructions had great detail and high-quality images with almost every step. Score +1 for the Google algorithm on that one. Unfortunately, there was one listing on the first page of Google search results that was obviously only there because the owner of the site had landed an exact domain for the search, MakeCrossbows.com.

The site has hardly any useful content, very little information inside of the articles, and it’s obviously only there to collect traffic from a semi-popular search term, and the Google algorithm hasn’t been able to recognize the site for the low-quality, traffic-collection tool that it is.  Subtract another point from the Google algorithm.

And then there’s the Squidoo site listed on page two of Google results. Page two!

It’s an extremely amateur-designed site with randomly tossed-on information about crossbows, a bunch of links and videos to external sites about crossbows, and a comment area. Where Google sees the value in this site, I have no idea – but there it is.

I was personally excited to see the first few Panda updates, and the demise of content mills. It was exciting to think that online writers that are diligently working long hours to provide interesting and useful content on the web would finally be rewarded by getting listed higher in Google search results than all of these amateur or mediocre sites with horrid writing that have been gaming the Google search engine for years. However, even after 25 updates, Google still seems to have succeeded at nothing more than hurting the ranking of sites with fantastic and useful content because they are newer, while pushing results of older domains higher in search results regardless of quality or actual value.

That is what I believe the findings above reveal, but I’d love to hear your analysis of these listings and the current state of Google’s search algorithm. Have the recent updates hurt or helped your site? Do you like the direction that Google is headed with each update? Share your input and insights in the comments section below.

Today in Cool Websites and Tools, we take a look at 5 cool websites, including customizing your Facebook timeline with a high resolution cover picture, reviewing past driving exam papers to give you the edge in your own test, a place to try out programming languages with minimal setup and much more. Read on below!

 

Metronome – The Metronome has come full circle with this free online version from the guys at 123. Find the tempo and boost your rhythmic state with a real metronome. Choose from a wide range of BPM’s, patterns and beats right here to find the groove. From hand claps to 808 drum and snare, musicians are sure to make use of this fine tool. Whether you’re a guitarist, drummer or singer, this app is a big help.

 

Coverbud – Coverbud allows you to create unique and personal cover photos for your Facebook timeline. You can personalize any cover you see on the homepage with your own photos, text, and colors. Simply authorise Coverbud to access your Facebook account, choose a design from the site, customize it to your liking, then Coverbud will publish it to your timeline. Quick, easy, and simple. Each cover photo is a high resolution image and looks great.

 

Bazqux Reader – Are you one of the Google Reader refugees looking for a suitable replacement reader? Then look no further than Bazqux Reader. It shows blog posts and comments in one seamless stream, tracks what was read and displays only new discussions next time. Comments from Reddit, Livejournal, blogs with comment feeds, Disqus and Facebook widgets are supported. Unlike Google Reader however, Bazqux is a paid product, costing either $9 a year, $19 a year or $29 a year. All users get 30 days free.

 

Driving Tests 101 – Your driving test is probably one of the biggest events of your life. Passing it will earn you your driving licence, and with that, a whole world of possibilities open up. So preparing for the test becomes extremely important, and like all test preparations, the best results will come from studying previous exam questions. This is what Driving Tests 101 is all about. Simply choose your country and province and the relevant tests will appear.

 

CompileOnline – Just follow the simple steps to compile and execute any of your favorites programming languages online using your favorite browser and without having any setup on your local machine. Select the programming language you want to write, write it in the text editor provided, then click the button to see your output. It’s neat, tidy and free.

 

Did you know that in just 1 Internet minute, over 72 hours of videos is uploaded to YouTube; 15,000 songs are downloaded from iTunes; over 500 new websites are created; and Amazon makes about $83,000 in sales. The Internet is a bustling place and various different things can be happening at the same time. To break it all down, Qmee designed this straightforward infograph depicting the various activities performed online in a single minute.

How do you spend most of your time online?

Click to enlarge.

 

Though it’s where its fame and fortune first came from, Google has advanced far beyond just being the world’s most popular search engine. You and I both know that Google plays host to many amazing services that we use on an everyday basis. Gmail is a great example. I have Gmail. I bet you too have Gmail! How about the late, great Google Reader? That was a service that so many of us would already love to have back. Why Google, why?

These are just two examples, and you’d be pretty surprised to know how many other goodies Google has floating around out there. Beyond their alerts system and floundering social network, Google has developed a wealth of web applications that just aren’t given enough shine. We’ve done articles in the past that help highlight some of Google’s hidden treasures that don’t get the limelight they deserve, but Google is always changing and pumping out more. In this article, let’s look at another three.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a great place to go when you want to see what is hot on the web. When that sort of content comes to mind, the first thing you might think of are Trending Topics over on Twitter. Trends is to Google what Trending Topics are to Twitter, except without the social aspect. You’re getting what is on the rise in Google Search.

As the above screenshot manages to capture pretty well, what you’re normally going to see on this list are things like national or world news and events, movie releases, sports stories, and things of that nature.

Beneath each result, Google gives a rough estimate of the recent increase in searches for terms related to this subject and an immediate link to a related article to help explain the change in search volume.

Google Trends is a localized list, and you’re able to see results from the US, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, and more.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is a really quick and simple way to look at hundreds of different font faces through the web browser, offering features that cater more specifically towards webmasters.

This website allows you to view 629 fonts by word, sentence, paragraph, or poster. You’re able to sort this list of fonts by alphabet, when the font was added, by how it’s trending, and more. When you find a font you like, you can add it to your collection of saved fonts for later use.

When you’ve selected the fonts you’re interested in using for your website, simply click the Use button in your collection and you’ll be offered several different ways to import the font to your website.

The best part is these fonts don’t need to be downloaded or anything to be used on your site. You only have to include a single line and a bit of CSS code to your page and you’re able to make use of them, all thanks to the powers of the Google Fonts API. Here is my colleague James taking a look at how you can use Google Fonts in a web project.

Google Sky

While Google Sky is a feature from Google Earth, it does have its own standalone interface on the web.

I don’t need to go on about how awesome Google Earth is, because you’ve surely heard of it by now. How cool is it that we’re able to go practically anywhere on this planet and get an interactive view of the area, all through a website? Google Sky offers this same experience, but the imagery is provided by NASA satellites, the Hubble Telescope, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Put simply, it is the Google Earth for space exploration. Although the search feature was recently disabled, you’re able to drag and scroll all through the galaxy and zoom in to ridiculous resolutions to see beautiful images of our sky in detail.

Google Sky is a project that was put together by developers during their 20% time, and while it lacks some of the major functionality of services like Google Maps and Google Earth, it’s worth appreciating. If Google keeps up at this pace, we’ll be on track for a Google Universe in the next however-many years!

It’s a short list of services, but a list of very purposeful ones that I can only hope never experience the termination that services like Google Reader and iGoogle are going through. Have you ever used any of these three services before? Which one seems most interesting to you? Leave me a line in the comments below and let me know!

 

Picture this. You’re starting a new pet store, and you’ve devoted an insane amount of resources into developing a website that is just awesome. It’s responsive, the design is slick and professional, and you have a back-end e-commerce system ready to start processing the orders that you hope will start rolling in by the thousands.

You’re ready to accommodate the hordes, but you don’t know how to get the hordes to realize your site exists. It’s time to fill your site with content, and you know that it needs to be crafted in a way that’ll bring in people from the search engines, but you really have no idea where to start. Search engine optimization just feels like black magic to you. It’s all voodoo.

Then, out of the blue, like a sign from heaven, you get an email from someone proclaiming that they’re an SEO expert and they’re prepared to help you get your site listed immediately in the top 10 Google results for search terms in your industry. It seems too good to be true, but what have you got to lose? You’ve got to do something, right?

Actually, you do – but responding to that “expert” is not the thing to do. Unfortunately, because SEO is one of the most misunderstood aspects of web design, it is also a primary target for scam artists that prey upon unsuspecting website owners, willing to do anything for a piece of the search engine pie.

The Magical “Top 10″ Google Listing

Being an SEO expert these days is more of a stigma than an honor. I’ve had every response you can imagine when people that I first meet or start working with learn that I’m the “SEO guy”. It ranges from outright scoffing (“That SEO crap is nonsense”) to attempts to undermine or belittle the entire process (“SEO is only for content mills”). It’s nothing new – and anyone that’s part of this industry is pretty familiar with it.

So, why is it more of a stigma these days? Well, it’s because of the scam artists that have created a very negative name for search engine optimization.

They are nothing less than thieves. They will come in, make lots of promises, provide seemingly positive results, and then before you know what has happened, they’re gone and so is your money. Want to know the crazy thing about it? They aren’t lying. They really can get you listed in the “top 10″ of Google results.  I’m going to show you how they do that, and why it’s an outright scam.

Getting Listed In the Top 10 is Easy

When most people think of “SEO”, they think of just finding keywords that tons of people are searching for, and then writing articles focused on that phrase. Simple, right? Actually, that only takes one factor of search keyword value into account – search volume.  The two other factors to consider are competition and niche (more on that later).

What these scammers do is go fishing for people that are fairly new to web design or web publishing. They look for people that hopefully don’t know anything about those three search keyword factors. Or, at the very least, are not aware of the importance of connecting search volume with search engine ranking.

Let’s say that you own a pet store and you just launched your website. You respond to one of these scammers, and they promise you that you can rank within the top 10 on Google for the search terms: pet bird toys, free virtual pet, and pet food recall list.

You’re thinking – hey, people that search for those terms are looking for pet related stuff, so it’s all good! Imagine if that person then provided you with content that landed your website on the very first page of Google results within less than a week! Imagine how exciting it would be to see your website ranked right up there on top! Clearly that SEO “expert” did exactly what they promised. The proof is right there in black and white! Well, not quite.

Before cutting that check to the so-called SEO guru, you may want to head on over to Google Adwords Keyword Research tool, and check out those search terms. This is one of the best tools out there for identifying search volume.

An average 70 searches a month. Not exactly the “hordes” of visitors you were expecting, was it? Once you realize this, your SEO expert will be long gone, and you still won’t have any traffic.  This seems ridiculously simple, but it’s the most common mistake people make when talking about how high they were able to rank on certain search terms. That’s great! You ranked at the top of search results! What good is that if no one is even searching for the search phrase you’ve ranked so well on?

Competing is Hard

The other side of the scam is that the keywords they choose to promise great rankings for you are those that are very low competition. This isn’t the same as the competition listings you see in the Adwords research tool – that is actually how many advertisers are trying to bid for those keywords. What you’re interested in is how many other websites out there are targeting the search phrase that you want to rank well on.  The SEO scammer will find very low search volume phrases with very few websites out there trying to rank on those phrases.

Finding competition data is probably the hardest factor to research, because you need to count the number of high-ranking sites that are listed high in search results for that term. One awesome free tool is the free MOZ Keyword Analysis tool.

The thing is, a low competition – or “difficulty” – rating of 41 percent would be brilliant, so long as the search volume was really high. However, scammers know that it’s a whole lot easier to find obscure search terms that have no competition, and to rank in the top ten when those search terms have really low search volume. It’s one way to look like an SEO hero, without actually being one.

Striking a Balance is What Experts Do

In other words the answer is yes – SEO companies can guarantee a top 10 Google result. They can also produce such a result. The problem is that being listed in a top 10 Google search result doesn’t mean anything if no one is interested in the search term. It looks good to the uninformed, but it’s meaningless.

That covers two of the important factors – volume and competition. An expert SEO researcher will take the time to trace down searches that have both high volume and a competition level that’s within the range of your website’s ranking or authority – its ability to compete in that arena. The higher your existing authority, the further into those highly competitive areas you can get.

However, this brings us to the third factor – Niche. SEO experts of today are no longer just focused on analyzing the keyword density, structure and format, and the title layout for your pages. Today, SEO requires so much more than that – it demands creativity. It requires understanding popular search terms within the niche that you serve, popular trends on social networks in that niche, and what titles produce higher share rates. Today, SEO means creatively turning a seemingly dry search phrase into content that is interesting, compelling, and gets your readers to interact and keep coming back for more.

SEO con artists can certainly rank your web pages within the top 10 of some random Google results, but they can’t perform where it really counts – traffic, shares, and a higher site authority in Google’s eyes.

Image Credit: Security Disguised Burglar via Shutterstock