How to Create a Popular Website

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to talk to you about creating a popular website. Now, to create a popular website, one of the first things that you're going to want to do is know what people are currently searching the Internet for. Now, how do you find that out? Let's go to our computer and I'll show you. Google actually offers a service called Google Trends. If you open up your Web browser and you go to google.com/trends. This is Google Trends, and I'm going to search for, let's say, television shows and click on Search Trends. Now, this is basically a listing by Google that shows when people have searched for phrases that I searched for, basically, television shows. And it kind of gives you a little graph here about how popular those results have been over time. As you could see, in 2004, people were searching for television shows quite a bit, and that trend has actually gone down over time for what people are searching for. It could be that they're searching for more specific shows or it could be that they're not interested...as interested as they used to be. I'm going to show you another example. Let's search for dog breeds. Here's another example of something that was very popular in the past. Its popularity has sort of gone down a little bit. As you can see, here at the end of 2008, it took a little bit of an upswing. Now, it's those upswings that you want to be interested in because that's what's going on now, and that's what people are most interested in now. Now, it's going to show you what countries here, down at the bottom -- or regions, it calls it -- have been most interested in that type of search, and within the country, what cities most people are as interested in. So if I was doing a website on dog breeds, I might want to focus my content towards people in Denver and Portland and St. Louis. Those are just some of the...some of the ideas that you can take into consideration when you're building your Web page. Now, obviously, Google Trends is a good way to get started building a popular website. Just build your page, and then you can add in a system called Google Analytics that will determine what people are searching for. Just go to google.com/analytics and sign up for that. And that way, you can tell what they're hitting, where they're coming from, and what keywords they're searching for to come to your site. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just told you how to build a popular website."