racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Here’s something anyone into SEO (search-engine optimization) would find useful: Google Trends. It’s a spanking new service brought to us by Google Labs (meaning, it’s still in “beta” stage, just like most other things Google) that lets users compare search volume trends across keywords or phrases (from two to five).

Say, I want to check out trends in the search volume for “blog” and the plural “blogs” for the past couple of years, I get this result:

The blue line would be for “blog,” while the red for “blogs.”

So clearly, more people search for the singular rather than the plural form of “blog,” and this trend has been on the rise ever since. The tool also marks the peaks, or high points in search frequency, and gives the details on the particular top search results during that period.

What’s great is that this tool also gives you the trends in how often the searched keywords appear in Google News items, another great way of comparing across keywords or phrases.

Another good feature is the geographic aspect of the search trends. Trends gives information on the top searching countries, cities, and languages for the queried keywords.

Now what good is this for SEO? It helps you identify which keywords or phrases are best to use, when coming up with content for in-site optimization (i.e., keyword density) or link anchors for off-site optimization (i.e., backlinks). Do check out the SEO Philippines blog if you’re interested in making your blog more search-engine friendly.

Or perhaps you’re just interested in checking out what people are looking for—Trends would come in handy for this, as well.

More information on Trends can be found on the About Page.

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