Posted in Internet Marketing Strategy	October 5, 2007

Use this tool to see what is on searchers' minds

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

Blogging works best when it's done daily, and that takes a lot of information. One endless source of info—the news—is a great way to excite your readers while educating yourself. But how do you know which types of news excite and which types bore?

That is answered, in part, by Google Hot Trends, a free service that shows the top 100 fastest-rising Google searches every hour.

If you were torn between writing about UK rock band Radiohead selling digital versions of its album "In Rainbows" on a donation basis, and writing about thousands of imprisoned Burmese monks, Google Hot Trends can help show you which topic people are more interested in.

On the day this post was drafted, Hot Trends showed that four different Radiohead-related phrases were on Google's Hot Trends list, while no mention of Burma, Myanmar or monks were listed.

Since more people during that hour searched for Radiohead than for the monks, writing about Radiohead would be more likely to generate website traffic.

So, if you're torn between blog topics for the day, take a look at Google Hot Trends for some inspiration. It could cause a web traffic surge for your site. The key is speed. The faster you can post your blog content, the faster Google can index it and start sending traffic your way.

Google often indexes Mequoda websites in a matter of hours. If you create a post on a topic that many people are searching for and optimize it well, you could leverage huge amounts of traffic.

Be careful, however. You do not want to deviate from your publication's topic too much. That would risk diluting your valuable content and losing ground on your site-wide keywords.