Have you ever thought to consider how different searches either go hot for a short period of time and then die down or are seasonal and only used at specific times of the year?
I know bloggers who make small fortunes from identifying new unique trending topics and either creating new blogs for them or pages within their own blogs for those keywords.
They target them for one reason only. They are often easy to rank for than established terms as there is no established search competition.
So where can you find which keywords are trending?
For the purpose of this post I am going to avoid talking about recurring seasonal keywords like “Christmas presents” and focus on new trends.
Here are some great resources that can used to identify trends and inspire new blog posts and Seeds:
Using Twitter To See Trends – What’s the Trend does a weekly roundup
Using Wikipedia To See Trends – Trending Topics does a great job of helping you see what’s hot and going to get hotter
Google’s View On What Is Trending – A search related list would not be complete without mentioning one of or in this case, two of their tools so for those of you who may not be aware of Google Trends and Google Insights, they are awesome!
You’ve written your post and now what?
You need to make sure you’re post is optimized. Here’s a useful checklist:
- Is the meta page title formatted to include your trending keywords?
- Does the post title contain your trending keywords?
- Does the first paragraph contain the trending keywords?
- If you’ve added an image does the alt tag contain the trending keyword?
- Have you linked to your post internally from either part of your navigation or other posts?
- Have you managed to get links from other websites to your post using your keyword or post title?
- Have you managed to use Twitter, Digg, Stumble or other social networking / bookmarking sites to link to your post?
If you can say yes to all of these you’re in the game and you’ve got a good chance of ranking for your target terms. However you’ll need to be aware that your ability to rank highly is affected by your general domain authority as well as specific optimized pages, which is why creating ongoing Buzz is so important.
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