DaveN & Patrick have become master at spotting popular search trends early creating blog posts specifically to target the terms. Given the trust in their domains they often end up ranking for these popular topical search terms even if they are completely off topic.
Google Trends is always a good place to start for a bit of opportunistic traffic hunting, but there’s a new way to get an idea of what might be a popular search term long before it pops up on Google’s Zeitgeist.
By now you’ll have almost certainly come across Twitter’s search functionality. It’s great for reputation monitoring, but what we’re interested in this the half a dozen trending terms:

These terms are precisely what lots people are talking at this moment in time, and if they are talking about it there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be searching for it as well.
And if you see something you know about that you think you can out-scoop someone here’s the steps you need to take

1. Upload a blog post with a title very similar to the trending term – ideally you want your title to be an exact match of the trending term or at least at the beginning of your title tag.
2. Make sure it’s pinged to Google blog search, you’ll probably have this set up by default but it’s important to be indexed early.
3. Point a few links in its direction, they don’t have to be particularly high quality, perhaps from your twitter account or from a couple of popular blogs you know get spider-ed often and ideally have their links followed
4. Make sure you have plenty of internal links pointing at the page – if you have a really complex page rank sculpting system in place the pages getting cached that day might not encourage the bots to spider the page you’re hoping to slingshot into the rankings.
5. All the usual SEO best practice tips apply, key phrase in url, h1 etc. But you’re blogs already set up like that right?

The only shame is there isn’t an RSS feed of the trending terms like you get on Google Trends

Guest post by Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility