Part of attracting visitors to your website is knowing what topics are hot and what people are seeking. Whether you’re studying trends to find potential topics for content to target social media, or whether you’re wondering how you should optimize your pages for search engines, trend-tracking tools can be incredibly helpful.
The resources listed in this article are all free, and they go about tracking trends in a variety of different ways. Try to find a few that you think will be able to help in your own work with your website or blog.
Google Trends
Google trends provides data on search phrases that are hot.
MSN A-List
MSN A-List provides information on popular topics, people searches, and rumors.
AOL Hot Searches
AOL Hot Searches is similar to MSN A-List with a variety of information on hot topics.
Lycos 50
The Lycos 50 lists the top 50 search phrases of 2008 on Lycos.
Most Popular Searches from Search.com
Search.com popular search list provides a quick way to see what is popular at the moment.
eBay Pulse
The eBay Pulse shows what items are selling right now, and which items are being watched the most.
Tops Searches on Ask.com
Ask.com also has it’s own list of top searches.
Amazon’s Best Sellers
Amazon’s Best Sellers list includes various categories and can provide a glimpse that may be helpful, especially for affiliate marketers.
Amazon’s Movers and Shakers
Amazon’s Movers and Shakers may not be the top sellers, but they’re the products that are gaining the most in terms of ranking.
Amazon’s Hot New Releases
You can follow Amazon’s Hot New Releases list to stay on top of the latest products that are of broad interest.
Top Searches at Shopzilla
Shopzilla provides some useful information that shows what shoppers are searching for.
Alexa Movers and Shakers
Alexa’s traffic rankings are far from perfect, but the Movers and Shakers list may help you to identify some current trends.
URLTrends
URLTrends will provide a trends report based on a particular URL.
POPURLS
At Popurls you can quickly see what is doing well at a large number of social media sites.
Techmeme
Techmeme is a constantly updated site that publishes links to tech news.
Technorati Popular
Technorati’s Popular page will show you some current trends of the blog world.
Ice Rocket Trend Tool
Ice Tocket’s Trend Tool will letter you enter a word or phrase (or multiple phrases) to see how often it has been mentioned on a timeline.
Wall Street Journal’s Most Popular
For finance-related content, Wall Street Journal will show you what’s popular.
New York Times Most Popular
The New York Times also provides a look at popular searches on its site.
Keyword Forecast – Microsoft AdCenter
Keyword Forecaster from Microsoft AdCenter forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.
Google Zeitgeist
Google’s Zeitgeist is the collective effort of other Google trend tools mentioned in this post.
Google Trends for Websites
Enter a URL and Google Trends for Websites will show you where it’s visitors are (geographically), other sites that they visit, and other searches that they perform.
Google Insights for Search
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
SEOmoz Popular Searches
Updated once daily, SEOmoz’s Popular Searches is an aggregation of popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web.
Hitwise Widgets
Download a Hitwise widget to bring the latest online trends to your desktop.
Techmeme Leaderboard
The Leaderboard at Techmeme shows which sites are mentioned most frequently on Techmeme.
RSSmeme
RSSmeme shows popular blog posts that have been shared.
Friendfeed Top Links
See which pages are being linked to the most by Friendfeed users.
Trendpedia
Trendpedia lists popular search phrases and also lets you compare trends of multiple phrases.
Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is a social media sites, but it’s better than Digg or the other major sites for seeing what news is truly popular at the moment, although not all industries and niches are represented.
Truemors
Truemors allows you to follow news and rumors.
Alltop
Alltop links to popular sources of content in a wide range of topics.
Twist
Twist allows you to see what is being mentioned on Twitter.
What Are Your Favorite Resources?
Which of these sites do you use? I’m sure there are others that could have been included on this list, so feel free to mention them in the comments.
Originally Published January 21st, 2009
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[...] 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools | Traffikd [...]
Wowzer. Had no idea how many trend tools there are, must of taken some time to get all those together, unless ofcourse you use them all everyday.
I use RSSmeme the most, find some good stories on there. Will certainly check out more now though.
Thanks for sharing.
Graham
Great, now I’m gonna get addicted to tracking trends! But seriously, this is a very handy list.
Loved this! Thank you so much for this information!
DJ Baker
[...] There’s probably a few here I have not used but perhaps you have not used any of these 33 trend tracking tools [...]
Twitscoop (http://twitscoop.com) (hot twitter words & phrases) seems to have a lag of ~ 5 seconds. Not bad!
Great post!
Also: http://www.uuorld.com/wordontweet shows where in the world topics on Twitter are popular.
[...] 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools [...]
What about Facebook’s Lexicon?
[...] 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools | Traffikd (tags: marketing seo tools trends analytics social) [...]
Hey I did a post on something similar here: http://www.thinkseer.com/blog/25-sites-giving-keyword-data-for-free-how-to-use-it-to-drive-seo-success/2009/02/11/
It was a little more how to find niche keywords, I like this list as well, thanks!
The trend of a good article thank you
[...] to find what trends are happening? 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools will steer you in the right [...]
[...] Originally Posted by buzzword Dave, With your experience, you can probably add to this list, I’m sure. There has to be many more… Help me out: Comprehensive TREND Sites List No problem….here is a few. 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools | Traffikd [...]
Thanks for passing on these useful tools, this will help me alot.
nice collection on search engine.
[...] 33 Free Trend Tracking Tools [...]
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