One of the most basic SEO strategies for content development is the process of determining what people are searching for in your niche so you can target those keywords. When it comes to news sites, even sites with a niche as specific of this one, you must look at search trends. SEOs and publishers have been using search trends reports, such as Google Hot Trends, Twitter Trends, Yahoo Buzz and other keyword tools to discover trending searches and benefit from them.
Like I said, we occasionally do it here and it works. You hit a forming wave on searches, and rank well on that wave, you can generate a ton of traffic quickly – which makes advertisers happy.
According to the New York Times, Yahoo, one of the biggest online news agencies in the world, just discovered this as a tactic. They are going to create a blog and staff it based on just writing content based on search trends.
Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.
Of course, SEOs and Webmasters are mocking this strategy at WebmasterWorld. Here are some comments:
Ahh, so now Yahoo’s staff will start writing or aggregating content based on what people are searching for. Excuse me if I’m not excited by this. Should I expect we’ll be seeing lots of celebrity gossip, erotica, discussions about the latest episode of Jersey Shore, and inane articles about Justin Beiber?