How to Find The Top Keywords For Your Story Titles Using Digg.com

Using nothing more than Digg.com's search feature you can research the best keywords to use your next story title.

Today, I decided to put together some rudimentary statistics on some keywords to find trends for specific categories. By filtering on just front page stories, results are returned which are both popular and contain the keyword(s) you’re interested in for your next title.

By doing this you can get some historical evidence to how well your title’s keywords will capture the interest of readers. There are of course other factors which determine how popular your story will be such as the body content of the story itself but writing an interesting title get’s you half way there.

Here are some sample keyword trends and respective results sorted by category:

1. "top" - 3197
2. "how to" - 1399 (notice I used both "top" and "how to" in this post's title :)
3. "top 10" - 226
4. "top 5" - 50

1. "war" - 4770
2. "peace" - 46

1. "apple" - 1912
2. "microsoft" - 1569

1. "mac" - 2317
2. "linux" - 1591
3. "windows" - 1499

1. "intel" - 777
2. "amd" - 272

1. "php" - 4255
2. "java" - 319
3. "css" - 275
4. "ajax" - 257
5. "javascript" - 168
6. ".NET" - 155 (this is somewhat misleading because the results contain references to unrelated posts such as URLs with a .net suffix)
7. "perl" - 91
8. "ruby" - 68
9. "python" - 65
10. "c++" - 61
11. "ruby on rails" - 35
12. "c#" - 21
13. ".NET Framework" - 11