Mariana Bettio has charts, and she is not afraid to use them.

Twice a day, The Times reports internally on what people are searching for and the results are astonishing. People are searching for Man Boobs and arriving at The Times Online – and the highest influx is from Pakistan. It turns out that Google ranks traditional media highly… and then, suddenly, the hits stopped coming. The Man Boob flood has rescinded.

Were people suddenly less interested in Man Boobs? Apparently not, according to Google Trends. The rise and fall of such trends is often inexplicable, and how much of that search traffic is driven to any given site doubly so. Another story on The Times ranks highly in searches for Brother Sister Sex; the story in question having a large number of comments, mostly – but not all – negative. Still, the influx of traffic from search is at a constantly high level.

It’s well known that search-traffic spikes occur in line with news about current affairs – sometimes even ahead of a breaking story. Some of this information is a stock-traders dream; searches for Bradford and Bingley spiked shortly before it was common knowledge that they were in trouble.

The knowledge of what people are searching for can be useful to drive investigative journalism – writing for the market that people are interested in. More to the point, you can also use search-knowledge to predict who’s going to win X-Factor – a bookies dream for odds-setting?

Charting hot-topic buzzwords is interesting as well – you are, in fact, charting the Buzz itself. The Times Online can (and presumably does) use this information to refocus their story-writing efforts. Of course, care must be taken not to write articles that are not interesting to the motivations of those that search, so Google Trend data should be treated differently from search data on your own site.

SEO is not without wide-reaching burden. Whilst search data is used to suggest topics, it is also used retro-actively to boost the results of relevant articles. The modern journalist needs to be aware of how to write in an SEO friendly manner, and not all take to this with ease. Ladening a headline with keywords can be important – but it still has to make sense! With 150 to 200 articles a day published and 20 million articles on archive, it’s a mammoth task to apply SEO pro-actively and retrospectively.

Once you have relevant traffic and engaged visitors, keeping them engaged with further relevant content is no easy task – often done manually. The technology to provide related content automatically is new, but Zemanta comes highly recommended by the crowd.

Conclusion: The Times, they are a changin’…