There are several analytics services on the market to help you gauge your web site’s traffic and overall popularity. But if all you really want to know is how you are faring against your biggest competitors, there’s a new, but very big kid on the block.

Google Trends for websites is essentially a tool for showing how popular your website is. It generates a snapshot of site traffic and compares results with (up to 4) other sites. Instantly see:

• daily unique visitors (with graph)

• where they are located

• what other sites they have visited

• what they are searching for (by terms)

Google Trends is free and available to Google accounts holders (which is also free). See if your big competitor offline is really your biggest competitor online by comparing the number of unique visitors. Find out what search terms your visitors are typing beside your brand name, then reevaluate your SEM strategy. You can even identify stealth competitors by seeing what other sites your visitors flock to.

So whether you’re looking for competitive intelligence or just plain curious, check out Google Trends for websites and see where your site stands.

Every market has its “lighthouse customers” - those that are going to be out ahead of all of the others (and ideally the ones that will show everyone else the way). The challenge - how do you find them?

One easy way is to submit your product to ThisNext. It’s a community of people who are such enthusiastic shoppers that they want to tell the world about their latest purchase - ranging from what’s a good baby gift to where should you buy tires. The site lets its users engage in shopcasting - a combination of shopping and broadcasting.

In any case, if you are looking to introduce your product to potential buyers, you can submit your product to the site and they will consider sharing it with their mavens (their most enthusiastic shoppers and reviewers).

This is an easy way to engage in some targeted sampling that may help give your new product a little more oomph in the marketplace.

Despite the appeal of the web, not everyone spends every waking moment in front of a screen. Sometimes your customers are just whipping up something in the kitchen. So, the important question is … how do you reach them when they seem to be beyond reach?

Enter the wireless refrigerator magnet-widget offered by Coolshrank. It’s just what it sounds like - the web enabled version of everyone’s favorite - the refrigerator magnet. However, now that the old refrigerator magnet is wireless and able to pull in feeds (and your advertising), what’s old is new again. Consumers are able to configure their Coolshrank widgets with a web-based administrators tools. Advertisers, on the other hand, can target Coolshrank users with text, display, and MP3 ads. Don’t you think it would be helpful to target refrigerators in certain zip codes or IP address zones.

The next time your target consumer opens the refrigerator door, you can actually ask the question out loud … got milk? Brands like Heineken, Land o’Lakes, and Absolut have climbed on board to exhort consumers right at the point of consumption. Don’t you think that your consumer brands deserve the same level of attention?

Many people have just given up trying to guess correct domain names for companies or brands. They’ve gotten to the point where they just type everything into the search bar first, then go from there. This behavior might be something you can capitalize on if you have a domain name that’s not just perfect for your brand or company.

Try advertising your search terms, in addition to your domain. For example, local Atlanta running store Phidippides has a very difficult domain name - it’s nearly impossible to spell. In case you were wondering, the company was named after the original marathon runner. While the brand name has authenticity in spades, what makes it tough is the fact that even spelling champions hesitate before all of those p’s and d’s. In addition to using its domain name, Phidippides should tell customers and prospects that they can find their website by simply Googling “running shoes atlanta.”

Because the company comes up as the first result in a Google search, it’s a great way to reinforce that they are indeed the definitive leader in running shoes and apparel. And, even better, by driving more people to their site with search, they’ll only reinforce their number 1 position. Oh, and of course, they will be able to stop worrying about the fact that no one can spell their name.

Up until now, publishers could use Google’s Adsense network to place ads on their site. If they wanted to use multiple ad networks, they would have to rely on someone else to manage the optimization across networks.

Now Google has added another piece to their puzzle, thanks to the addition of Google Ad Manager. It’s an ad management system that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and ad network-based inventory. As we discussed in Marks the spot, there are several other popular tools that publishers use to manage the different ways that you can sell ads for your site. Maybe your sales team will sell something special. Maybe you’ll work with one of the many specialty ad networks that perhaps focused on your industry. Then, of course, maybe you will want to carry ads from one of the big dogs, like Google. Now publishers can use this tool to manage all of the pieces.

Want to target ads to your site visitors’ geography, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, and domain … here’s the way to do it.

While search engines can certainly get you a lot of answers, your customers aren’t always sitting in front of a screen. If you’re a restaurant, coffee shop, or movie theater, how do you fish where the fish are?

Google Mobile Ads can help connect you to people who are searching while they’re on the go. This capability is so much like regular search ad placement that it’s easy to forget that it’s really a distinct offering. For example, if you go to google.com on your iPhone, you now see a page built specially for you. When you use the well-known Google search, you will find, in addition to search results, text search ads. You can make sure that your ads are included in these search results by indicating so in the same Adwords platform used for standard search ad placement. One simple click and now your ads are served up specifically to mobile search users.

The prognosticators forecast that US mobile search (ad) revenue will exponentially increase each year, from $83 million in 2007 to 3.8 billion in 2012, of course driven by a lot more mobile searching and a lot of ad placement by advertisers like you. If you’re selling an appropriate category of products or services (e.g., tire repair, coffee shop), now’s the time to make sure that your ads are available, wherever your buyers might be.

The video image search that you see on the web today isn’t really searching - it’s just pulling images based on tags or filenames. In other words, it’s not actually searching the video. If you have a lot of video to monetize, what can you do?

The answer might be a search tool like Viewdle. It’s a facial recognition platform that makes it easy to index, search, and then monetize video assets. As you’ll see on their site (and their example using video from Reuters), Viewdle presents a way for you to search through video and pull out people based on facial recognition. Looking for the best video image of Paris Hilton or Elton John, here’s an easy way to find it. It’s not the best tool for finding a video of Eudora Welty just yet.

As everyone has learned from the success of Google, search can be a powerful vehicle for monetizing content. By attaching this search tool to your content, you might find new revenue.

So you’ve slowly turned yourself into a pay-per-click advertising jedi knight. However, success can breed a new problem - complexity. Namely, thousands and thousands of search terms to manage, located across several different ad / search networks. Consider adopting a PPC management software application like SearchIgnite.

This web-based tool lets you manage your keyword driven campaigns across several different search engines. As your pay per click campaigns grow, they become just too big and complex for you to manage everything in your head. With a keyword management system like this one, you can make bid adjustments and track ROI in one centralized location. In addition to centralized management, there are additional features that support dayparting and keyword-level conversion metrics.

If you would like for success to breed more of the same, think about how search advertising tools can keep you from being spread too thin.

While most people start the buying process with Google or Yahoo!, these tools aren’t the right ones to use for many categories of things. Accordingly, they’re not always the right place to put your advertising, either.

Take homebuyers for example. When it comes to targeting them, you’re better off advertising with Roost. This real-estate search engine provides comprehensive listings (not yet nationally), including for-sale-by-owner listings. Search results feature photos, mapping, and summary information. In addition, users can adjust results using sliders, a handy tool for narrowing results by price, location, or even year built.

Roost makes money by hosting a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivering traffic to them. One thing for sure, Roost search users are definitely interested buyers. When it comes to going to the next level of search advertising, have you explored what vertical search tools exist for your industry?

When it comes to placing online ads, Google is the kingpin. However, not every site carries ads from their network. If you’re looking to reach a more targeted niche, where can you turn?

You can use your noggin’ and try IndustryBrains. This ad placement and management system works much like Google’s, but its network is focused on premium vertical publications - sites like GolfWeek, Motley Fool, BusinessWeek, USA Today, PC World, and Morningstar. First you select the website(s) and sometimes the specific pages in the site that work best for you. Then, you place a bid for what you will pay for each click through. Finally the system places your text ad based on its relevancy and performance.

When you’re ready to add some highly targeted sites to your ad placement strategy, this is a great place to start. Alternatively, if you know for certain that you target is reading the Motley Fool, why not just go straight to the source?

As with so many things in life, the best way to learn about using new, web-based tools and technologies is to just get going. However, even when you climb Mount Everest, you’ll probably want a guide. Who can play that role on the web?Well, you can turn to Lynda to walk you through how to use many different web technologies. She’s not a person (well, actually, she is), but a web based catalog of training materials.

For a subscription of as little as $25 per month, you or your team can gain access to how-to guides to: podcasting, blogging, search engine optimization, and even eBay. Training is video based, self-paced, and surprisingly easy to follow. This site features approximately 290 different training courses.

The next time you’re looking to tackle something like blogging (and here’s a ton of blogging ideas for you), you have somewhere to start. Or a guiding hand for anyone on your team.

We’re all familiar with the Wikipedia (as we discussed in Never too many cooks), the online, user-edited encyclopedia. What would happen if a search engine worked the same way?

We’re about to learn with Wikia, a people driven (as opposed to algorithm driven) search engine, created by the founder of Wikipedia. Wikia’s search engine results are built on trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. In other words, you will need to put your own search results into the site, so the search engine can find them. You can do that for free by helping to create “mini-articles” that appear at the top of search terms.

While remembering the rules of Wikipedia (don’t add the equivalent of spam), now’s a good time to go ahead and enter your company and brand information, so it appears in appropriate search results. You never know who might be looking.

You don’t have to leave search up to the big players. There’s an emerging class of search tools that are more targeted and easier to use.

Getitnext represents how a custom search tool can add value to a site that has a lot of content. In this case, the site in question is eBay. Getitnext clears out the extraneous, and often erroneous, items that pop up in traditional eBay search results. Users are presented with more accurate results and incentives like real-time auction countdowns and shipping-included cost. The Find a Deal feature serves up prime items with zero bids and less than 4 hours remaining in auction, essentially doing the legwork for the customers in search of a deal.

Consider partnering or (for you big guys) building a custom search that makes it easier for your customers to find you, shop, and then buy. Auto dealers would be a good example.

If there’s one thing that most people seem to understand, it’s that customers and prospects like to use search engines to find what they want. So, do you have a good search engine on your site?

Now there’s no excuse, because you can easily implement a Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, this service let’s you apply Google search technology to any site or combination of sites that you choose. First, you choose which sites you would like to search (i.e., indicate that you would like to search every page on your company’s domain). Next, you get a simple code that you can put on your site. There - it’s done. Anyone can come to your site and search. You can even put your logo on the results page, just like this good looking version.

For the $100 business edition, you can control advertising on search results pages and customize just about everything you see. Why are you still making your customers dig through your site to find what they want?

It’s easy to forget that you can create and place a search ad in less than five minutes. That speed and ease of placement don’t usually get you anything . . . but now they can.

Try using Google Hot Trends to combine the “in the moment” thinking of traditional PR with the tracking power of search advertising. Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for … right now. It doesn’t highlight what’s hot based on sheer numbers (boring terms like weather), but by focusing on sudden surges in popularity.

For example, a recent Hot Trend is the search term deceptively delicious - the name of a new cookbook by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife. You can use this knowledge to create a related search ad that drives traffic to your site. Here’s one that we put in place in a matter of minutes.

For as little as cents per click, you can target your search ads at the hottest trends. Give it a try.

Being in that number 1 position when your prospect or customer searches for you on Google or Yahoo! can do wonders for your business. While there are many, many different factors that can improve your ranking, there’s one that rises above all others - get other sites to link to your site. That said, how easy do you make it to link to your site?

Ever noticed how easy it is to link to sites like YouTube, Flickr, and many more. These sites have figured out that if you want people to link to you, it’s important to make it easy. They put the HTML code required to link to the specific photo or video right out in front where it’s easy to find. If someone can cut and paste, they can link back to the site.

No matter what content you have, it’s relatively easy to create a “copy this code” section that can make it easy for anyone to link back to your site. Whether you have white papers or even just made up advertisements, why not make it easy for your site visitors to help you improve your search results?

The web continues to democratize publishing and and turn journalism upside down. The blogosphere can get people to buy, but it can also turn people off. Given the importance of blogs, how do you keep track of who’s saying what . . . and where?

One tool merits your attention - Icerocket. Use these tools to monitor blog postings about your brand, product or company. Say you manage the iconic Cheerios brand. With a simple search on IceRocket, you can see that in the past month that 12 blog postings were made that mentioned Cheerios. One announces a Cheerios sponsored writing contest, another actually reviews a new product - Oat Cluster Crunch Cheerios. You can specify a search for Cheerios on MySpace, which turns up items from myspacetv, including this video of a baby eating some Cheerios.

This search tool can just as easily turn up web content that’s more disconcerting. If you’re interested in engaging in the online version of reputation management, start with blog search.

Good marketing decisions require you to think from your customer’s perspective. As media consumption moves online, one thought moves to the front of the line: what are the search terms your customers use when they’re looking for your category of products or services? These key words should form the core of just about everything you do online. Not clear on the right ones for you?

Wordtracker can help you identify keywords that are most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. This tool can be a valuable weapon in det