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!

One of the key things you need to do to rank better on Google is to pay
attention to these 4 things:

1. How long visitors spend on your site
2. How many pages they view while there
3. “Bounce Rate”
4. Speed at which your site loads

Here’s an explanation of each and why it’s important.

Rank Better On Google – Time On Site

Google algorithm that decides how sites get ranked is based on providing a good experience for the searcher.  One way Google measures this is by how long someone stays on your site.  If they arrive and then quickly leave, Google will interpret that as meaning the searcher did not find what they were looking for and therefore rank you lower on that search term.

The solution is obvious – try to provide more content people are looking for at your site.  Another term for this is “engagement”.  One way to help this is to include relevant videos on your site, that will keep them longer.

Rank Better On Google – Page Views

This also directly relates to engagement and is another statistic Google looks at. The more pages a visitor views, the more engaged they are in your content.

Rank Better On Google – Bounce Rate

Your “bounce rate” is a stat Google tracks that measures what percent of your visitors leave your site without viewing any other pages. It relates to the other analytics – they are all trying to measure the same thing really – did the visitor get what they wanted when they went to your site – if they did, you’ll get ranked better, if not, you get ranked lower.

Since the people at Google are so wicked smart, I believe it hopeless to try to trick them – why not just give the visitors what they are looking for and get some “Google Love”?

Rank Better On Google – Site Load Speed

This one is a bit different. It does still relate to the visitor experience but measures it differently. If your site loads too slow, people will give up and leave. People expect your site to load in a couple seconds, and if it doesn’t they are gone. Google knows all – so they know this too.

I just hired a guy on fiverr.com to decrease my image sizes so one of my sites would load faster, and it’s now loading twice as fast as before and the guy did it for me for $5.00.

So, although site load speed depends on many factors, this one is an easy fix. If the fiverr link doesn’t work – who knows how long the people on fiver are available, just search for “WordPress site load speed” or a similar term and you’ll find people who can do it for you.

Google themselves will track this for you if you have the free Google Analytics tool on your site.  Additionally there are many sites to measure site load speed.

A free site load tool I use is at webpagetest.org