I was looking through the Google Trends for the last few days and made a staggering discovery - Google has identified that searches done for words pertaining to ‘Fire’ have been particularly ‘HOT’ lately… so hot in fact, that they are ‘On Fire’:

Obviously the trends above are due to the devastating fires occurring throughout the Southern California region and if you would like to help you can Donate to the San Diego Red Cross.

How does one find-out about what’s topical online?

There are many tools available to help monitor such trends - here are a few that might help:

• Google Trends
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati’s Popular News (for keeping track of the popular topics people are blogging about)

So now that you’re keeping track of buzzworthy trends and topics, how can you use this information?

Let’s take the Google Trend results above as an example. Even if you cannot relate your company’s products / services to the topic, speak of your concerns or thoughts on the issues - some celebrities have already started using this disaster as a publicity opportunity: Cruise worry over California fire - your business could do something similar - write an article and donate some funds to the cause.

If your a little less tactful or sympathetic you could have a sale and promote it online with a headline like “Our Prices Are Hotter Than A Californian Wildfire”.

By keeping an eye on the latest search trends and hot topics, it gives you the chance to sculpt your website content and hopefully capture some of this search traffic.

If you think long and hard enough, you should be able to come-up with an angle that can relate almost any topic to any service - sometimes the more obscure the connection is, the better it will work as link bait.

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