As I mentioned in my article, Leveraging Google’s Zeitgeist, incorporating up and coming search terms can give your blog a search engine boost. I hadn't looked at any of the search terms recently and was surprised when I brought up the zeitgeist today. It has been replaced!

From the zeitgeist page:

On May 22, 2007, the original Google Zeitgeist for Google.com was replaced by Hot Trends, a dynamic feature in Google Trends. Visit Hot Trends for regular updates throughout the day into what people are searching for on Google.

Browsing through the hot trends, I was amused by number "82. britney spears thong bikini". A whole lot of people must be looking for this for it to pop up in the top 100 searches. Further investigation revealed numbers "55. britney spears puerto vallarta" and "25. britney spears mexico". Curious as always, I clicked on number 82. Aha! Britney Spears wore a thong bikini to the beach in Mexico and some paparazzi snapped a picture. The number 1 result talked about it but the number 2 result had pictures.

Is this what's hot in the USA? Frankly, I'm amazed that people are still interested in Britney after all the shenanigans she's been involved in.

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This is a subtle hint to Sean at Geek With Laptop that I'm impatiently awaiting the categories version of SRG Clean Archives. If and when he completes it, I plan to remove the "Archives" and "Categories" widgets from my sidebar and change the names of the "Extended Archives" and "Extended Categories" pages to replace them completely.

This is probably something that those who work with search engine optimization already know about. I'm writing this for the newer bloggers and specifically for those who have never heard of the zeitgeist.

If you can find a way to incorporate a gaining search term into an article, your chances of that article rising in the search engines increase dramatically. Even more so if you can incorporate it into the title of the article itself. What do you think would happen if your article was loaded with as many of the terms as you could reasonably fit? You just have to remember to make sure the terms are relevant to the article you're publishing or your readers will be able to see through your tactic. You want to encourage repeat visitors and an obvious irrelevant use of the terms could have the reverse effect.

Don't forget about your meta description and meta keywords. There are still a few search engines that use them. If you use the search terms in an article, double your chances of getting it indexed higher by including the terms as keywords.

Google's Zeitgeist: Search patterns, trends, and surprises is not always as current as you would like, but it's updated weekly. If you navigate your way through the pages, you'll find a wealth of search terms from not only the US, but from many other countries as well. Google only has one restriction on this information and I'll quote: "This information is free for your use, with the appropriate attribution to Google Inc. We welcome your feedback, suggestions, and questions. Please contact +1.650.930.3555 or send email to press@google.com"

I'm going to give you a perfect example from this blog. The article The Top 10 Blogs About Michelle Manhart (Who Posed Nude for Playboy) was specifically written to take advantage of the fact that Michelle Manhart was in the news and her name was one of the rising search terms on February 23rd. Looking through my logs for today, I noticed that I am still getting visitors who query her name as a search term.

In the near future, and it could even be tonight (my time), I plan to write an article about comics. I will be referencing the characters of Captain America and Ghost Rider specifically, among others. Captain America happens to be on the zeitgeist right now. I wouldn't be surprised if Ghost Rider appears on the next list since it's a newly released movie from Marvel Entertainment.

In summary, Google's zeitgeist can be a valuable tool. It can tell you what you need to focus on, if your search engine rankings interest you, and it can give you ideas when you hit a dry spell and can't think of what to write about next. There are other inspirational sources that are just as good, but each is a topic in itself.