The first step to rank better on Google with the free Google keyword tool is to understand how to use it.

to find it, the first tip is to make sure you have a Google AdWords account. Setting up an account is free, you don’t have to spend anything, but doing this allows you to bypass the “captcha”  – that awful test to see if you are human that I usually fail . . .

What’s with that, anyway?

Rank Better On Google – With An Adwords Account

When you have a “Google AdWords” account, you can login to the free keyword tool with your account and avoid those annoying “captcha” forms and also get up to 800 results instead of 100.  Usually your login will just be your gmail login, so if you don’t have a gmail account, get one of those too – they’re free.

Do we have any questions about why Google is dominating the world?  Offering lots of free stuff gets us hooked, and then they get us to spend money for ads that make them billions every month . . . but I digress . . .

There are three kinds of searches you can do using their tool.  A “broad match”, a “phrase match” or an “exact match” search.  Here’s what each of those mean:

Rank Better On Google – “Exact Match”

The “exact match” choice means Google will return only the traffic counts on keywords that have traffic for exactly that phrase. An example we’ll use as our phrase “dog training”.

Rank Better On Google – “Phrase Match”

“Phrase match” will return a larger search volume because Google is looking for any search phrases that include your phrase no matter what comes before or after it in the search string.  So, with this option Google will give you counts that include phrases like “Golden dog training”, “Dog training my terrier”, “Dog training for dummies”, “German Shepherd Dog Training”.

Rank Better On Google – “Broad Match”

“Broad match” is now looking for any search phrase that includes these terms in any order, with any other words before, after or in the middle of the phrase.  Phrases like “training my dog to sit”, “why does my dog pee in my house – I thought I was done with training him?”  Will show up in the search count.

Rank Better On Google – “The Secret”

Normally, SEO experts tell you to focus on the “exact match” searches to define your market.  But, what they are missing is that the difference between the “phrase match” results and the “broad match” results are an indicator of how many “long tail” searches are being done.

“long tail” searches are those with phrases from 3 – 10 words long.  Although the number of searches on any specific “long tail” term may be low, if you target correctly, you can get found for thousands of long tail phrases which will, in total, amount to a lot of traffic.

Rank Better On Google – “How To Use This Secret”

When you see search results for a phrase that has many more “broad match” listings than “phrase match” listings, what you need to do is include many of those lesser trafficked terms in your post.  Make sure they make sense, but by including 10 – 20 other phrases in your post, your post will get ranked for all kinds of obscure phrases.

Hope you found this helpful and, as always, call me anytime at 720-890-8760 or go to my blog at joemcvoy.com for more info

A few posts ago, we discussed 4 things that affect the way you get ranked better on Google.  Here are two more you probably didn’t even know about.

Get Ranked Better On Google – Using Google Authorship

You have seen examples of this whenever you do a search.  Google authorship is the term for having your photo show up next to your post in search results. You will get ranked better on Google if you use it.  See the examples below.

There are two separate reasons that this helps you. First, Google likes people to identify content that belongs to them that they created, and second, people are more likely to click on a search engine result with a photo. It seems more personal and people can feel more like they know you.

So, how do you get this done?

1. You need a clear headshot type photo.
2. You need a Google + account.  If you don’t have one yet, they are free.  Go to plus.google.com  to set one up
3. Next, you will need an email address at the same domain as your site/blog.  This is easy to set up by going into your hosting account and creating it there.  I already had joe@joemcvoy.com
4. You need your “author byline” to match your name on your google plus account.  I found this to be confusing as how to make it happen, so I recommend you install the free WordPress plugin called “Google+ Author Information in Search Results (Free Version)“
5. Once you install the plugin, your getting close to done.
6. You need to link your email from your site to your Google + page and also do it the other way too.  The Google site explaining this is here:  https://plus.google.com/authorship
7. Now, to check to see it works go to the “rich snippet” Google web site tool and put in the complete URL of one of your posts and you should see it.
8. Understand it can take a couple weeks for Google to get it going, and when you are good to go, they send you an email with the subject line: “Welcome To Google Authoriship”.

Get Ranked Better On Google – Using Google Circles

The next thing that helps a lot is your Google circles count. Not so much how many people are in your circles but how many people have you in theirs.

Google sees this as essentially third party endorsements of you so ranks you higher.

You can use the tool in your Google + account to show you people in your gmail to invite. You can also go on fiver and find people to get you Google circle followers. BUT, big warning, do not go and buy lots of followers all at once because Google will see that and probably penalize you.

Your circle growth needs to seem naturally occurring, not overnight so if you are going to buy some, I’d suggest adding 10 – 20 at a time and then wait a bit before adding more.

Do all these things and you will get ranked better on Google!