One of the fastest ways to drive up traffic through your blog is to write about the topics that most searched on the Internet. Do you agree with me that just make perfect sense? Just imagine that the most searched is Jessica Alba, Britney Spear or Linsay Lohan. If you have written something about them on your blog, there is a big chance that people will hit your articles. The question now is how and where can you find out what topics are most searched or are ‘hot’ and what keywords have been used for those topics? Well, I would like to share with you the tools that I am using and answer this very question. It’s very easy to use and save me lots of time and effort.

First, I have been using this tool to find inspiration or topic ideas when I am running out of ideas for my articles. I never thought that I will use it frequently. There are good results with this tool. I’m talking of course of Google Trends, a tool from Google Labs which show you the most popular searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now. The way Google search works is pretty simple. It will analyze a portion of the Google Search Engine to compute how many searches have been done for the selected terms. Then it will show you a graph with the results plotted on a linear scale. It also displays the top cities, regions and languages in which people searched for the selected keywords.

So, most of us bloggers would want to know what people are searching on Google today and what’s hot. Don’t worry, Google Labs have thought about it and they have released in May 2007 their Google Hot Trends tool. It’s the newest addition to Google Trends that will display on a daily basis the top 100 hot searches for the past hours. The Hot Trends list gets updated hourly and you will also find links to news, blogs and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today.

Now that you know exactly what to write about, you will need to find related keywords to your topics. I suggest you use this SEO Tools, Keyword Suggestions for Google, that will help you to choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected keywords. I hope you will find these tools useful when your head is running out of ideas or inspiration.

Sample of a Hot Trends list on March 9.