Have you heard about Google Trends? Probably not, it is not very well known among Google users.

Google trends is a tool who shows how often a keyword is searched in Google. The keyword should have a minimum search volume, otherwise the answer you receive will be:”Your terms….do not have enough search volume to show graphs.” More, it gives the option to compare different keywords searches. For this what you have to do is to input the keywords in the search box separated by commas. You can see the trend history, you can choose a region or a city or see in which city was most searched.

Hot Trends shows you what the people search for. It is amazing to see that in US - yesterday November 22nd, 2007 (but, of course you can change the date if you would like to see other date) - the people were very very very interested in … ‘national dog show’. ‘circuit city’ was on 4th position - of course was Thanksgiving!!! - ‘how to curve a turkey’ on 9th and “how long to cook a turkey “on 100th (I thought everyone knows that). After you select the term you can see the web results and in which news the term appeared.

The top 100 is funny (unpredictable most of the time - I can’t believe what people are searching for!), but the tool is not. Google Trends is really useful for SEO experts.

Today I would like to talk about Google Sandbox. Does Google has a sandbox? Does Yahoo have one? What chances has a new site to be found by users and well ranked by search engines?

The term sandbox describe the effect in which a SEO-friendly new site does not rank for non-competitive keywords in a search engine for some time after it has been indexed. It seems that this term is applied only to Google, other search engines, as Yahoo and Windows Live not being affect of it.

It is a long debate in search engine optimization world if Google Sandbox exists or not. Officially Google denies its existence.

If you have a new site and you would like to know if it is sandboxed, there are few commands you could use to check what indexed pages of your site have the highest ranking weight for a keyword in a domain, title and anchor text. Here you have one example we used for our own site (which is a very new site):

• allinanchor:seo company Lancaster PA
• allintitle:seo company Lancaster PA
• allinurl:http://www.jatoseo.com

If your site does not appear in Google’s first 50 search results and you are sure that your site is SEO friendly, maybe your site is sandboxed. What can you do? Not too much. Continue to improve your site. Good quality content, quality backlinks, article marketing will help your site to get well ranked.

Wait patiently and keep working!