Writers Love Words

As regrettable as it may be to writers because we love words for their own sake and a well-turned phrase is music to our ears, keywords—popular search engine queries rule the Internet. This is daunting to our individual style, but we can develop, polish, and publish our really creative writing with self-publishing, in an e-book or the old fashion way by sending it to a publisher, which can be done through e-mail…alas, that darn Internet won’t go away.

Take Advantage of Keywords

So what do we do with it? Take advantage of the power keywords offer us. If you are writing for a client that wants a certain keyword density, then use a keyword density tool like Live Keyword Analysis. You can type in up to three keywords you want to analyze and then paste your text in and get the results. If you don’t have the keyword density your client wants then figure out how to add it a few times and recheck. You obviously can use it to reduce the keywords until you get the correct percentage if you need to do that. You can apply this strategy to articles you write for HubPages, Helium or wherever you publish on the web if you so desire.

What Are People Searching For?

We know that popular search terms and keyword density go hand in hand. So what are people searching for on a frequent basis? The Yahoo Buzz Index relates the top searches at Yahoo each day. They rank the top 20 leaders and movers as Yahoo categorizes them. You can get the RSS and see what is going on daily.

The Lycos home page shows their top 50 searches. Interestingly the Drudge Report, Twitter, American Idol, and Hulu all show up at Lycos and the Yahoo Buzz Report today, which is April 23, 2009. Other sites where you can check out popular search terms are AOL Hot Searches, Ask IQ, and MSNA-List.You can find an abundant amount of information about what the public is searching for at AOL Hot Searches. They list the hot searches of the day and the day before. Which include things like types of surgeries, careers, bad breath remedies, and student loan debt. They also list their top searches at AOL for movies, celebrities, classifieds, TV programs, music, electronics, cars, vacation destinations, and finance.

Ask IQ offers up the most popular searches for each past week, plus the top new searches, and advancing searches. The top ten movies at the box offices and the top ten movies searches at Ask.com are also provided. Twitter came up as popular in last week’s searches.

At MSN A-List you can see the popular searches and headlines. The popular topics include: movies, DVD rentals, videos, health, sports, tech, money stories, and the top 5 in x-Rank.

Saving Grace For Creative Writing

Thinking over some of the popular topics that I’ve viewed at these sites, it occurs to me that there is a lot of leeway for a writer to use this information to write stories. The old tried and true idea of finding story material in newspaper headlines has only been shifted to Internet headlines. The advantage is watching trends and seeing the popularity of given topics. But a dramatic idea could emerge from seeing how popular the topic of the FBI Most Wanted is at the Yahoo Buzz Index and just research from there.

Anti-Aging Perfume is a popular headline at MSN today. That inspires ideas for science fiction and fantasy stories. What if …it didn’t work and a nut sought revenge or what if it did and a gigolo fell in love with his mistress, but she wanted to date other men?

Hey, use your creativity and take advantage of popular search terms to write scores of stories. Consider it pay back for the usual stifling effect of writing keyword articles. Plus, there are ideas for non-fiction books amongst those popular topics.