As we discussed in class, labels/tags are one of the best ways to make your blog posts search-friendly. But the challenge is to determine which labels/tags to use. Thankfully, Google can help us out. This lab explores two different tools that you can use to find the best label/tag for your posts.
Activity One: Analyzing Trends
We'll start with a basic tool that lets you look at current trends with search terms. Every time someone puts a term in the Google search box, the term is recorded in the Google "log" of activity. You can see what's popular and what's trending using "trends" from Google:
On this page you see two lists. The one on the left is "hot topics". Google provides a list of the most "talked about" topics on the web. These are topics/phrases that are showing up in the news, in tweets, in blogs, etc. The second list is the one we care about for this lab. It's called "hot searches". This is a list of the most popular searches entered in the Google search box. It's updated hourly.
Let's compare two search terms to see how Google Trends works. In the box, type:
social media, web2.0
Click on "search trends" to see what you discover. Which term has the most momentum? Which regions of the world are using which terms?
Activity Two: Insights
Now we'll get more sophisticated in our analysis. Go to:
Type in the box:
social media
Scroll to the bottom and look at "search terms" and "rising searches". This tells you what terms people are using in the Google search box and what are the "up and coming" searches. How can you use this information to determine what tags to use? We'll discuss this as a class.
Narrow your results to explore just the United States and only Jan 2008 through Jan 2010. What can you learn from this more detailed result?
