Being Trendy

Browsing through iGoogle widgets I have found a few quite interesting ones.
They are meant to show the latest Google Trends, unfortunately some of them seem to be broken.
I have decided to give a try to one installed below.
It shows the Hottest Google Trends, that means the most searched terms within the last hour ( or at least as often as G updates it).
The G Hot Trends page displays the top 100 searches, and in the gadget you can see the top ten.
Google Trends started in 2004, and since that time proved to be unvaluable tool for marketeers.
It allows to chart, and compare volume of particular search terms, and the data can be broken by country, region, city or language.
It is possible to refine the main graph by region and time period, and with some keywords are displayed on the timeline the news, that affected the search results in the past.
The picture shows the values of seraches for keywords hotel ( blue ) and travel ( red ).
You can easy observe seasonal drop of searches for word 'hotel' in December, and dramatic rise at the beginning of the year.

[picture from www.google/com/trends]

Free SEO site analysis at Cuwhois.com

I would like to reccomend another site with free SEO tools :
www.cuwhois.com [not a link here]
The site is in Spanish, but easy to understand.
The information about the domain is presented in a nice form,with many extended info, besides standard checks it tries to find LANG tags, and If-Modified-Since server responses.
It gives you some information about the host server IP, country,ISP and hosting name, also other places using the same IP. The only problem I've met here is that the tools preffer the www.domain.name formand have some problems with interpreting results , when your main page is simple domain.name, and you use redirection from www to non www.
The main page is given a SEO points 0-10, however the score is not explained.
The site is also checked for presence of robots file and various formats of sitemaps.
Google,AlexaTechnorati ranks are checked as well, yet it seems to miss blogs ranked in Technorati.
The extended tools allow you to check duplicated index pages, and Domain Hacks - nice tool for domain name variations like typo's and similar names.

The whole site is great, and became one of my tools ( in spite of some notes above ).

[note for myself on one of the domains I've seen that server responds with iso 8859-1 set, while meta tag on page states UTF-8 coding. I am going to check if it has any SEO importance.]

Web site promotion tools

On the site by instantPOSITION you can find some usefull tips and tricks for positioningand a couple of free tools. Besides standard IP checks one is particular interesting:
SEO Doc.
You can check you pages for keyword optimisation - online.
As usually the test is only a guideline , as search engines algorithmes are changing every few days.