How to View What Other People Search For

When you search the Web, the world knows about it.

Computer users search the Internet for multiple reasons. Some seek knowledge, and others scour the Web for entertainment. Site owners can profit by understanding what Internet surfers are looking for. For example, if you know that everyone is searching for "Brand X," add "Brand X" content to your site. Search engines will index the content and make it visible to Web surfers. Marketing experts refer to this process as search engine optimization. To discover what the world is looking for, visit an online site that spies on the search engines.

Instructions

Use Google Trends

1. Visit the Google Trends website.

2. Review the top 10 searches in the "Hot Topics" column. This shows what people are searching for by topic. The "Hot Searches" column shows the actual query terms that people are using to perform searches.

3. Enter a search query in the "Search Trends" text box, and click "Search Trends." A new page will open. The page contains columns for "Regions," "Cities" and "Languages." Each column contains 10 items. For example, the "Regions" column may contain "United Kingdom," "India" and "Australia." A blue bar appears next to each item in the column. This bar shows how popular your search query is for the adjacent region, city or language.

4. Click "Export this page as a CSV file" if you want to save the results in a comma delimited file. Then, click "CSV with relative scaling" or "CSV with fixed scaling" to save the file.

Use Yahoo! Buzz

1. Visit the Yahoo! Buzz website.

2. Review the results in the "Top Overall Searches" table. This table shows the most popular current searches and their rankings. The "Leaders" column of the table shows the search queries that have the most activity. The "Movers" column shows the search queries that are moving the fastest toward the top of the chart.

3. Click one of the "My Y!" buttons to add the search results to your "My Yahoo" account if you have one.

Use Search.com

1. Visit the Search.com website.

2. Review the most popular current searches in the table. The table shows 50 results at a time.

3. Click the "51-100" link to see the next 50 results. Continue to page through the results by clicking the other links such as "101-150" and "151-200."

References

• The Miami Herald: Use Free SEO Skills to Promote Your Website - Small Business

Resources

• Google: Google Trends
• Buzz: Yahoo! Buzz Index - Today's Top 20 Overall Searches
• Search.com: Most Popular Searches