Free programs are becoming increasingly popular, and among them are free email clients. Microsoft Outlook is costly (more than it’s worth, in my personal opinion) and is known to be somewhat clunky. As a side note, I found an article that seems to be a good source for Outlook fixes. The good thing is that some services like Google’s Gmail are phenomenal, and Mozilla—the people who created Firefox, which is consistently rated the top internet browser—has Thunderbird. Thunderbird is actually quite similar to Outlook in appearance and general functions, but I’ve had greater success in keeping Thunderbird organized and working smoothly than I have with Outlook. The one downfall I’ve encountered, though, is the more-than-occasional warning message that states “this message may be a scam.” Different from spam messages, scam messages would be those that are trying to lure you in and eat at your wallet in many cases.

Well, it’s good to know that Thunderbird is watching my back and will warn me when a message may be trying to trick me into some scheme. So what’s the problem here? A well-known issue, the message pops up at times even when the recipient has added the sender to his/her address book, and the message will be displayed with each email from the particular sender, no matter how many times the recipient has click the “Not a Scam” button.

How the recipient can work around the “scam” warning

Say you’re receiving regular emails from a publication to which you are a subscriber—likely, a publication that is giving you some kind of information to help you run your business and make more money—and while you know that the emails are perfectly legitimate, Thunderbird keeps flagging them as scams. And if it were to start flagging multiple valid senders, you might start feeling annoyed.

The easiest solution is to disable the feature. Go to “Tools -> Options… -> Security -> E-mail Scams” and uncheck the only option on that page, which is pretty self-explanatory. Be advised, however, that this will disable the feature for all messages, no matter who the sender. So you’re on your own for separating scams from legitimate emails.

One way that was found by a Thunderbird whiz (he isn’t a hired programmer) is to edit Thunderbird’s configuration. When editing anything in the main configuration panel, you should be careful that you don’t inadvertently change anything else, and Thunderbird will remind you of this in a sec.

Changing Thunderbird’s configuration to whitelist non-scammers

Now go to “Tools -> Options… -> Advanced” and click the button that says “Config Editor…” Thunderbird will immediately tell you to only proceed if you are certain of what you’re doing. In most cases, you’re probably only going in here with explicit instructions to solve a particular problem, so go ahead and say “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (Do this by clicking the button; others nearby may think strange things if you say it out loud to your computer )

Find the line that says “mail.trusteddomains” and double-click on it. In the pop-up box, type the addresses you’d like to have whitelisted, separated by a single comma (i.e. “lymelightwebs.com,mozilla.org,mozilla.com”). Again, this was found by another techie who knows Thunderbird well but is not working for them; as I haven’t tried it long enough, I can’t totally vouch for its validity as a solution. But it hasn’t harmed my Thunderbird, so no worries there.

Developers—and support—from all over

One thing that Mozilla stresses is that there are thousands of people all over the world working on its projects, Firefox and Thunderbird. What this means to you: It probably gets hectic, so the developers may not be able to focus on things like the scam filter; but there are people all over the place who can help. One place to start is, of course, right here because you have others who know the language and can search out the answers that may be hard to find.

Companies such as Google operate in much the same way, employing so many people from all over. This, along with the fact that these companies make a lot of open-source (read: modifiable by some techies) software, means that there is far greater possibility for improvements. Quick ones, at that. Upgrades and add-ons are constantly available for these programs. So the questions that begs being asked: Is Microsoft doomed? Personally, I’d say…absolutely.

Google Gmail – I use Gmail accounts for all personal and some professional email.

Mozilla Thunderbird – My business emails are pulled into Thunderbird so that they aren’t forwarded from my website’s server. Note that Thunderbird does not provide new email accounts.

Catch up on Trends by reading parts one (starting out with Google Trends) and two (diving into more details) of the series.  Google Trends is a fascinating tool for helping you pinpoint keywords for SEO (search engine optimization) of your website.

Exporting your Google Trends data

Exporting is quite easy, though understanding what you’ve exported may not seem as simple. By clicking the small blue plus sign to the left of “Export this page as a CSV file” (under the subregions/cities/languages sections), you can choose to export your .csv file with relative or fixed scaling. A .cvs file can be opened with Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, Google Docs, or another spreadsheet application.

When working with email newsletters for clients, we export to .csv files so that the names, email addresses and other information are easy for clients to sort. So you may see these files more often than with Google Trends.

For right now, we’ll say you want to see the “fixed scaling” report because it is likely easier to read. Your browser should have automatically downloaded a small file called “trends.csv,” so go ahead and open that.

Understanding standard deviation

One of the first things you may notice about the chart is that for each search term, there is one column labeled with the term and one labeled as “std error” (indeed, I might call an STD an error, but this is a little different). This oddball column is to account for “standard error” or “standard deviation,” which in layman’s terms means “plus or minus.” So you see that for a particular week, one search term has a ranking of .6 on your scale and a standard error of 2%. This means that the position given to the term during this week of .6 is accurate +/- 2% of that .6. Generally speaking—and for our sake of finding some keywords to use—the standard deviation will not be important.

Reading the “fixed scaling” Trends report

The information in the “fixed scaling” report is generally based on information from January of 2004, and the 1.00 mark doesn’t change with time as it does with relative scaling; therefore, you can trace the numbers and compare them to one another. These numbers still don’t look like much, though. Putting them in a graph (in Excel, select the data and select “Insert -> Line Graph”) will make it all much easier to read. Ideally, you don’t even need the graph to include the standard error columns because seeing the minor changes in standard error over time is even less useful to us than is seeing the percentages for standard error. Again, because this is fixed scaling, you can certainly look down the line and see precisely how it’s been moving over the course of your selected time period.

Putting your SEO keywords into practice

After you’ve run as many keywords and phrases in as many ways possible, take some time to figure out how you should proceed with your website and other marketing. Quite possibly, the things you assumed were the best descriptions of your work or company are not being searched nearly as often as the more simplistic versions. The people who are looking for you are doing so because they don’t know your field—they don’t know the industry buzzwords or what your work is technically called. If they did, they wouldn’t need you.

For my company, we’re more technically web developers because the additional programming that we do behind the scenes is what sets us apart from others who only do design work. But who would really assume that they need a web developer? Thus, my results are quite predictable. Similarly, for entrepreneurs who haven’t yet realized that they need a website or for those who aren’t sure how to start, I broaden our keywords to include things like “starting business” and of course “small business.”

Your own results with these keywords

Do you have any revelations to share since playing around with Google Trends? Have you found from your website statistics that people are hitting your website based on certain keywords that you didn’t expect to see? Did you at least find this three-part series on using Trends helpful? Leave a comment below!

Has your brain been wracked enough yet? Well either way, it’s time for round two! If you haven’t, be sure you read part 1 of “Google Trends helps you reach your target market” to get caught up – we’re looking at this very useful, free tool and how it helps us get past the first step of finding keywords for our websites. Let’s jump right in…

Your keywords in the news

Beneath the graph that we were looking at last week, the Search Volume Index Graph, is the News Reference Volume graph. This graph isn’t scaled the same way that the Search Volume graph is; so while you don’t need to look as deeply into this one, you do need to remember to switch modes when looking at either one. Instead of using relative comparisons for plotting the lines, the News Reference Volume graph simply shows you when there was an increase or a decrease in the number of news stories about your keywords. Notice that there are no numbers on the axes of this graph and that it follows the time frame you have selected. In my case, December 2009 saw the largest decrease in the number of news stories about web design and May 2010 saw the largest increase in the number of news stories about web design.

What the news is saying about you

Maybe they aren’t talking about you, but if you look to the right of the two graphs, you see a list of news headlines with their sources and publish dates. This is in no way a conclusive list of news headlines, as A) these correspond only to points in time when Google picked up on a notable spike in related news stories, and B) these particular stories have been drawn at random from all related stories published around the specific point in time. For example: In early October 2009, there was a spike in news stories about web design, so Google Trends marked it with the flag B. This happens to be at a time when there was a relative increase in the number of general searched on “web design.”

My guess in this case is that the two are hardly related. The news story that was automatically picked from that time period is about a script that allows Ubuntu users to use Mozilla Firefox. Ubuntu isn’t really a news-maker and the script allowing Ubuntu to run Firefox probably wouldn’t have led the masses to search for web designers. Just a guess

Similarly, news flag D happens to mark a point when searches on “web design” began to decline (relative to the entire year). A news story about a web design company creating 40 jobs when Americans are struggling to find jobs is likely not the cause of the decline, so it’s safe to say that this randomly chosen news article is not quite indicative of the time. As you see, you don’t need to live by this news section of Google Trends.

You can click on “More news results” under that list to be taken to Google News, where Google will have already searched your keywords for all the news that has been published about them.

Where in the world…

Where are these people who are looking for you? And do you need to learn some quick Russian to be able to get a hold of them? Look below the graphs and news section and you’ll see sections for subregions, cities and languages. Google explains this one best: “Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site where the search originated.”

It’s possible that these results won’t be 100% accurate, as “Trends” is using its best guess, but it may be helpful to look into these results. To determine top-ranking regions and cities, Google Trends divides the number of searches on your keyword from each region by the total number of searched from the region. So if there are X number of searches coming out of Las Vegas, NV, and Y number of them are on “web design,” then Google Trends works out the math in Y/X and ranks Las Vegas among other cities using the same math each time.

What do you think so far?

Now that you know a little more about this powerful, free Google tool, see what kinds of information you can glean from all of these aspects and how the information can help you. If you’d like some additional insight or more help with the tool, leave a comment here or email me (jayme@lymelightwebs.com). And if you’ve come up with astounding information or other helpful tips, comment below!

Next up, we’ll export our data and analyze it to find the right set of keywords.