If you have a personal blog or a website you will know how important it is to rank high on Google searches. Without ranking high on Google you are missing out on a lot of traffic. By including top ten keywords from Google you have a better chance of showing up in more search results.

Most people think that to have access to this data you need to spend a lot of money on SEO services and analytics. The answer is HELL NO! We can do all of this for free using Google's own tool called Hot Trends located here. This will give you access not only to the top 20 searched for keywords on Google from today but you can also use it to go back in time (sadly not forward yet!) to view the top twenty keywords for a specific date.

Now if you couple this with a little bit of analytics you can see how these keywords can help you improve your Google traffic. Let us take a look at the site and see how it works.

I started off by visiting Google Hot Trends and I saw this:

top 10 key words on google

Listed on this page, from the top to the bottom, is first the search trends box. By adding some search keywords and hitting search trends you will see something similar to this:

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This will show you the search volume for your term over a specific length of time or across specific regions. This is great for helping you nail down a search term to associate with your website.

Below that you have today's date that you can change to view hot trending topics for recent dates or long ago. You do this like so:

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Click on the change date link as shown above and you will then be able to change the date. I changed mine to February 1st 2010 and then saw this:

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Sweet! Now you can add this module as an iGoogle Gadget to your Google homepage by clicking on the iGoogle Gadget button at the top right of the search term boxes next to the RSS link and icon.

When you click on this you will see something that looks similar to this.

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After clicking on the Add to iGoogle button the widget will be added. If you are not logged into Google it will create a temporary page that you might or might not see the next time you log in. So log in first then add the widget. When you are finished, it will look like this:

top 10 key words on google

And then finally the way I track Google's hot trends and most popular search terms is by RSS feed (we covered ways to use RSS feeds here). That looks like this:

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Yours may look different depending on what RSS feed reader you use to view the feed. I just clicked the link and allowed it to open in Firefox but you could plug this atom URL into your RSS reader. Clicking on any of the search terms will open a Google search for that specific topic!

Do you use Google Trends on a regular basis?  Or do you use another SEO tool?  If so, which one do you use?