Higher Search Engine Rankings Tip: Free Tactic Helps You Gain an Edge on the Competition

Whether you use pay-per-click (PPC) or organic search engine optimization (SEO) to generate traffic for your website, you need to know what words or phrases people are typing into a search engine.

Then, you can either bid on those keywords or keyphrases using PPC or use SEO to optimize your website.

But what if you don’t know what those words and phrases are? Or which ones the search engines think are important?

Google, which is now responsible for about 50% of all web searches (and that percentage is growing every day), has a special algorithm to determine how search results are delivered. The exact algorithm is a closely guarded secret but Google does provide us with some clues.

Part of Google’s current strategy is to index words and phrases associated with specific keyword phrases. If you know what those related words and phrases are, you can bid on them or add them to your SEO strategy.

How do you determine those words and phrases?

Google will tell you IF you know how to ask. All you have to do is enter a primary keyword preceded by the tilde character (~).

Let’s say your website is about spirituality. If we type “~spirituality” in Google, we see the expected list of related websites. However, if you look closely at the results, you’ll notice several words and phrases in the site descriptions are in bold text. The text in bold will either be the keyword you entered or phrases Google considers to be related.

Google search results for ~spirituality

These are the phrases that came up in bold:

1. culture
2. spirituality
3. Christianity
4. religion
5. spiritual

Would you have guessed “culture” would be on the list? Judging by the number of culture sites in the results, Google considers culture to be very relevant. Right now, the top ranked site is Wikipedia’s listing for ‘Culture’. Interesting, you would expect Wikipedia’s article on spirituality to rank higher.

I wonder how many sites that are trying to rank high for spirituality are focusing on words and phrases like ‘higher power’, ‘law of attraction’ and ‘God’ while overlooking culture.

And take a look at this. When doing a Google search of “Culture”, I see there’s not a single PPC ad in the search results. That means you could have an ad at the top of the search engines for the minimum 5-10 cents per click with zero competition.

I can’t say for certain how much traffic it would bring to your Spirituality site but I’d certainly give it a shot since there’s very little risk.

If you’re into organic SEO or have someone working with you that is, I would definitely add ‘culture’ to your current mix of keywords and phrases.

Take a minute to visit Google and try this for your website’s primary keyword phrases. You might uncover a phrase that the competition has completely overlooked.

I’d recommend coming back and running this search on a regular basis. Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm so you might find different words and phrases showing up in your results next time. The good news this tactic won’t cost you a penny to utilize.

Two other ways to find great keywords and phrases are listed below:

1. Good Keywords – Free Software to Help Locate Keywords
2. Word Tracker – Free Trial Service to Help Locate Keywords

By the way, if you don’t have a website up yet and would like to get started online, you need to check out my Ebook Mastermind Class. Class begins Monday, Oct 22nd and seats are filling up fast. To get a free 48 minute audio on starting your own ebook business, visit the link below:

Ebook Mastermind Class