Your title and title tag are two of the most important elements of any blog post. They let the search engines know what the post is about. This is where you want to put your best keywords. But how do you know which are your best keywords, especially for a newsworthy topic?

Time to check out Google Insights, an amazing tool that lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

I was writing an article about swine flu today, and visited Google Insights to find out whether people are searching on the phrase “swine flu,” or “H1N1″ or similar variant. I plugged in the phrase “swine flu,” and set the filters to show me how it was being searched on the web (as opposed to image, or video search), in the United States, in the last 30 days. Here’s what I learned:

As you can see, the term “swine flu”, despite the best efforts of the pork industry, is being searched on far more often than searches that include H1N1. And though you don’t see it in this table, I also found out that the top three states searching for info on swine flu are Alaska, West Virginia, and Mississippi.

So I have my answer to my question of which keyword to use in my newsworthy blog post or article: “swine flu”. Google Insights is both incredibly useful, and a lot of fun to play around with.