Google Search Tips

There are many ways to use Google search to find information, but a dedicated blogger needs to know which ones are likely to help him get the information he needs.

For basic tips and tricks using Google the Google’s tips and tricks pdf is as good a place to start as anywhere. But I was a bit surprised to find how little it actually tells you, OK it shows you how to find exact phrases, how to screen out unwanted results using a – symbol and a few other helpful modifiers. But if you are blogging and looking for ways to suss out the competition and find long tailed keywords that are highly audience targeted, then it doesn’t really help. So if you want some Google search tips and tricks that might help, then read on.

Sussing out the competition

If you enter a search phrase into the inquiry box such as Google search tips and tricks with no limiters you are likely to get around 512 million sites returned. Not very helpful really because you are getting results for every word in the phrase.

Now add in inverted commas either end of the phrase i.e. “Google search tips and tricks” so that only get exact matches for that phrase and you will find that the results now come down to about 20,500 results. A hugely significant reduction that tells you what the competition level is like for that specific phrase. I would suggest that 20,500 is a lot more attractive than 500 million plus in terms of whether you want to try and compete.

Now here is another step you can take, type in allintitle:”Google search tips and tricks” and you will see that the competition for the exact phrase in the title of a blog or website is only around 200. Which means that if you place this phrase in the title of your blog post or on one of your websites you will only be fighting against 200 plus other sites. I think you can see that this is quite useful to know.

So what about finding out about the quality of the websites you are up against, pretty easy really. If you have the Google toolbar plugin on your browser and have included page rank as an option, then all you need to do is click on the first result and find out what their page rank is. Its also a good idea to click on the last result on the first page to see what that is. I can say that at the time of writing the results ranged from PR3 as the first result to PR0 as the last result. Logically then if your post or website is ranked PR1 or higher then you really should be on the first page of Google if your title includes that exact phrase.

Of course there is more to it than that, it’s no point finding a phrase that is never searched on for instance. Because beating the competition into the dirt for something no one is interested in is hardly worth the effort, well actually it’s not worth the effort at all. So guess what, I just wasted my time other than making a demonstration of a useful technique. So I hope you value my valiant efforts.

Finding Long Tail Keywords

First of all, what the hell is a long tailed keyword? The term comes from statistics and refers to ‘long tail distribution’ in for example a supply and demand chart. The head of the curve sits in the high demand and high supply region of the graph and in keyword terms is where a single word keyword would sit.

At the other end of the curve is the long tail which sits in the low demand and low supply region of the graph. In terms of keywords it is where keyword phrases with 4 or more words in the phrase would sit. The significance of this being that there is: -

• Lower content supply
• Lower demand and competition
• But a higher target audience factor

This is in direct contrast to a single word short tail keyword like ‘holiday’ where, for example, you are likely to get a massive set of search results but don’t really answer the enquirers question because the results are too broad. Go to a long tail query like ‘holidays in the South of France’ and the search results will give up less results but they will be more targeted. So for someone who only wants a holiday in the South of France they will get results they are more likely to click on, and from your perspective you will be fighting less people for that click.

Now you need to know where to find those long tail keyword phrases. You can start off my putting yourself into the shoes of the person entering an inquiry into the search engine, what would you write if you wanted a particular product, service or piece of information.

Once you have thought about a few different options you can start to write them into Google and if you are in the standard view page (the default) you will notice that Google Suggest starts to kick in with help in making suggestions as to what you are looking for. This is live data, these suggestions represent what people have been entering into the search engines recently and the more you type the longer the suggestion becomes i.e. get to 4 words and you have a recently popular long tail.

Another option is the ‘Wonder Wheel’, this can be accessed from the Google search results screen by clicking on ‘show options’ (after clicking it offers ‘hide options’) then going down the menu to the ‘Wonder Wheel’ option. The result is that you get the spoke wheel image shown. Clicking on one of the satellite phrases opens a new set of options and you can continue drilling down until you find a phrase of interest.

You will still need to do further research into the viability of any phrase you identify and assess whether it is a term worth focusing on, but you do now at least have a means of finding some potential candidates for exploration. The recommendation is that you focus about 70% to 80% of your writing to the long tail and about 20% to 30% to the short tail, you never know when you might get lucky. What that means is 2% to7% of the 70% to 80% is your long tail keyword phrase and 2% to 7% of 20% to 30% of your content should be a short tail phrase or word, Hope you understood that but if not you can try this Keyword Density tool to help.

There is another way to identify the best keywords to use, long tail or otherwise and that is to spend some money on a software package that helps you find keywords for your niche, Keyword Elite comes highly recommended from many of the online Gurus. Might be worth having a look at the pitch so that you can make up your own mind on that one.

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Google Search Tips

Google Search Tips

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