Welcome to the Escape Blog

Steve Rubel has noted that Google has started adding a time-stamp to SERPs (search engine results pages):

“As of right now you can’t sort Google results by time. From the advanced search page, however, you can limit results just to those that have been indexed in the last 24-hours. You can’t get more granular – at least yet. Date-filtered advanced queries are not a new feature but I believe the time stamps are.”

He also mentions a 2009 prediction from Louis Gray that suggests the real-time web is going to be a major development this year, especially with the increased popularity of blogging and micro-blogging.

As Steve notes, this has a big impact for (online) PR and, I guess, SEO.

It also places emphasis on ‘new’ content, which in turn will surely increase the prominence of the aforementioned blogs, social networks etc.

This is surely a natural progression for Google and sees yet another move towards universal search.

The idea of developing ‘keywords’ for your business has really come of age with the growth in popularity of SEO and PPC advertising. But keywords are useful elsewhere too. They help to focus on key business areas and define what it is that customers or clients are really looking for from your business.

Identifying the right keywords is a tricky job, but Google has made it slightly easier with the launch of its Search-based Keyword Tool. As Google states on its own blog:

“…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.”

So the tool is designed to analyse your website and identify keywords that you should potentially be using. Google is promoting this primarily for PPC, but its not hard to see the SEO benefits too. The tool then gives you the usual ‘monthly search’ and ‘competition’ metrics for any keywords you highlighted.

When combined with the traditional Google Keywords tool, you have quite a powerful (and free) range of keyword searching options.