Daily List of Trending Topics - October 22, 2009

One of the questions members frequently ask the Support team is for tips on how to get more views to their content so they can earn more points. An easy way to do this is by checking to see what is being searched for on the major search engines and to pick a topic that interests you from the list of top searched trends to write about.

Today I’m focusing on Bing.com’s search engine. I’ve attached this morning's list below, and I’ll be publishing this list daily to the Earn More Points and SEO groups. Feel free to check out these posts for ideas. If you write about one of the items on the hot trends list, and use the keywords that are being searched on, your content will be one of the items returned in the search engines and you’ll draw more viewers to your content.

Here are some guidelines on how to write content that will draw more viewers:

• You need to choose the right keywords to be Search Engine Optimized. Use the keyword phrase at the beginning of your title and in the first sentence of your post.

• To find the right keyword phrases check Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) or Bing (http://www.bing.com) to see what’s trending. You’ll often see popular TV shows, news items, sports events, lottery numbers, celebrity news and weather events.
• Another way to get the keywords is to go to http://google.com and type in the name of the item you’re considering writing about, such as your favorite TV show or sports team. You’ll see some phrase search options appear under where you’re typing – any of those could be keywords to use so pick the one that applies best. I find this works best in IE.
• http://www.bing.com has a trend list hat shows the top search terms for the day; and it includes over 100 trends. Here’s how you find it: go to http://www.bing.com, on the homepage click the More link, under ‘bing at a glance’ click xRank, then click on xTreme movers. Results will list in groups of 10 and you can see many options.
• Here’s an example of a TV show title that works: “Weeds Episode 6 Season 5: A Modest Proposal (with translation) – Did you watch!?” (click here to read the post) This title works because it lists the show, the season and the episode number. This is most often the way that searchers on Google look for the show they’re searching

• To be quickly picked up by the Search Engines you should publish to Gather’s News Essential (http://news.gather.com) and appear on the group’s homepage. To do that you need to use certain tags. Make sure when publishing to this group that you use at least one of the following tags: Top Stories, Commentary, Entertainment, International, National, Sports.  You can also publish your content to another few groups that are relevant, but not more than 4 or 5 groups.
• During publishing check the “share on Facebook and Twitter” options.
• For more in depth instructions read Tom's series published to Earn More Points for ways to maximize your point earnings on Gather.

Below is a list of the top trends being searched on BING.com as of 10:20am ET today. Is there anything here you’d like to write about? Give it a try and see how you do.