First…

First, go to Google Insight, and select the Geographical location you want to target. This depends if your target are general internet users, or specific users that will buy your product locally.

Why does the Date Range matter?

You have the option of selecting date options such as last 7 days or last 12 months. For our purpose however, 12 months is too wide a range for internet trends. The hotness of the topic might have faded long ago. 7 days is timely, but it might give you results that won’t last beyond a week. No staying power. If you’re targeting short-term hot trends, I would suggest going to the Current Google Hot Trends here. You can see all the topics that people are massively searching for right now, and if there’s a topic that you are familiar with, write about it.

For the hot daily topics, even though your post hasn’t  been around a while to get linked to, it works because of the Google Freshness Factor. Google rewards you for being a fresh post on the topic, so that their search results can stay relevant and up-to-date. For our testing purposes right now, select “Last 30 days”, and Category “Entertainment”.

Here you can see the search term “twilight” and “twilight movie” having a search spike in the last 30 days. And if you click on “twilight” or enter it in the search terms above, you’ll see more details on the term.

Hey look, there’s a +2400% spike for the search term “twilight reviews movie”. The 2nd placed search term spike “movie reviews” is probably too generic to do you any good. Generic terms like that probably has way too many existing pages staking it out already, and you don’t want to start off with an uphill battle.

Got a topic, Got a search term, Now what?

Now that you found a topic that you are interested in writing about, it’s time to find relevant keywords. The way it used to work is, if you spammed your keyword over and over on a page, you’ll automatically get a high ranking. That just had to change, otherwise too many articles on the internet would have repetitive words. It worked to trick the search engine, but it was extremely boring to everyone else.

Here’s how you’re supposed to do it today. Go to Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion here. Type in the search term “twilight reviews movie”.

Scroll down to where it says “Additional keywords to consider”. It is sorted by relevance, so the first few keywords, you should sprinkle into your post. That lets Google know that you are really talking about “twilights reviews movie” and not someone who is just using keyword tools to gain Insane Traffic. Right? Google uses a ton of secret algorithms for determining how relevant your post is, and they change it regularly. Here’s a post I wrote on some more of those secrets, straight from Google’s mouth.

So there you have it, the secret to getting Insane Traffic with Google Insight. It’s also great when you have no idea what to write about, you can just ride the latest trends and be the life of the blogosphere party. Got another trick for getting more hits with your post? Please share it here.

Here are some of the more interesting excerpts from WebProNews:

Do backlinks from bad sites negatively affect my PageRank?

Those links might be positively affecting your PageRank (PageRank does not go down from “bad” links like those from adult sites). In general, you don’t have to worry about bad links like that which point to your site that aren’t under your control.

Is it true that the fewer the links FROM your website, the more influence they have on the sites receiving those links?

Google’s Answer: PageRank is split up over the links from a page, but I would recommend not concentrating on this (as you won’t be able to “measure” and act upon it anyway) and instead making your site as usable as possible for your visitors.

Translation: Yes, the more you link the more the link juice passed on is diluted, but don’t go trying to figure out the formula in order to game the system. We’ll figure you out. We’re Google.

Until recently (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?

Google’s Answer: In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience. If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

Check out the full article written by Jason at WebProNews.