As SEOs, understanding the user intent behind a search query is important stuff (What is Java, anyhow?). I often browse through Google Trends and am intrigued by the results. Last night I checked in with Google Trends, to marvel at the latest buzz in cyber space, and saw an interesting result.
The keyphrase ‘bone marrow’, with a related search of ‘sweden’s longest border’ were the 4th listing. huh. Try and understand the user intent behind that one! Is somebody walking sweden’s longest border as a charity drive for bone marrow research? Nope. Has a new study shown that the ‘bone marrow’ of people residing along ‘sweden’s longest border’ are particularly adept to producing high volumes of ‘blood cells’? Still no.
Lucky for me, I had watched Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader earlier in the evening along with who knows how many others across the country. (OK, the lucky part is debatable, but that’s beside the point.) In last night’s episode the $100,000 question was:
In humans, bone marrow produces which of the following types of blood cells?
A. Red
B. White
C. Both Red and White
A. Red
B. White
C. Both Red and White
The question immediately following was:
Sweden’s longest land border is with what other country?
Google Trends provides us with a snapshot of the output of user intent. We are challenged to navigate through clues, such as Google Trend’s Volcanic Hotness status and related searches, to and make sense of seemingly unrelated relationships between terms and understand user intent. Now that, is why I love SEO.
3 Key Takeaways from Search & Social
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I would have never guess the correlation – I missed that episode.
Nice start to your blog. Looking forward to more.
Cheers.
You found me! I was planning to build some content up before I invited my SEO pals to take a look. Let me guess… it was the link to seobythesea.com, right?
It was the link – when I saw the name of the blog show up in my referrals, I couldn’t help by stop by and say hello.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to add a link to your blog in my blog roll. If you want me to wait, let me know.
Thanks Bill! I am already frustrated with the duplicate content, inability to affect URL conventions and site architecture, lack of a cool domain name, and the loss of link love if I ever change locations that come along with using Blogger. I would love a link if you don’t mind changing it when I get setting in my permanent home.
You’re welcome, Lindsay.
For all their issues, there’s still the potential for a Blogger blog to rank well for some things. But I’m not sure that I would use one these days after using Wordpress for a couple of years.
It shouldn’t be any problem to change the link, if and when you move.
Thanks for the link!! I can see that you noticed the URL change. I suppose I’ll be sandboxed with the new URL… but I’d rather take the hit now as I am building up value and content. I am going to look at wordpress again based on your recommendations from some time ago…