For most people, the term “search engine” has become synonymous with the name “Google.” But what many don’t realize is that, aside from the generic search engine capabilities, Google also offers plenty of free tools to help improve your SEO and get the most out of your site. The following guide offers helpful advice on pairing services like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to tweak your site and kick up your search engine ranking a few notches.

How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO: General Google SEO Tips

Since Google is still a search engine at heart, you’ll need to implement a few SEO tactics in order to take full advantage of the tools Google offers to help optimize your site. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Don’t neglect the power of “off-site” links. Google places a lot of emphasis on links, says Chris Dawkins, CEO of Trace Media Marketing, a New York City-based SEO and Internet marketing firm. In other words, the more links that point back to your website, the higher Google will rank your site.

2. Reach out to sites with similar keywords. Ideally, says Dawkins, you want to obtain links from high quality websites that are related to your target keywords. If you want to reach a high search engine ranking for “Chicago tutors,” for example, your best links would come from other sites that also rank well for that search term. Reaching out to these sites through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook has become a popular and highly effective method of obtaining external links.

3. Maintain your “on-site” optimization. This involves the more commonly known aspects of SEO, says Dawkins, such as creating accurate, but descriptive, meta tags and regularly posting keyword-rich content to your site. Naturally, if your site is about cars, for example, the more well placed, automotive-related terms you use within your content, the better SEO ranking you’ll likely get as Google crawls your site.

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How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO: Utilizing the Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools help you to identify and fix problems within your site, such as broken links, which enables you to boost your SEO by making it easier for search engines to crawl your website. The Webmaster Tools also help you to see where on the Web your site traffic originates from – an invaluable tool for improving and marketing your site.

The Diagnostics Tool
“Your site is not going to be relevant for that search term if you don’t have that content,” says Rob Docherty, an SEO consultant based in Louisville, Kentucky. “Google will tell you to fix the problem, then they’ll come back and index that page,” he says of the tool’s diagnostics tab.

Sometimes during the creation of websites, developers block search engines from accessing content and forget to undo the action. The Webmaster Tools’ diagnostics feature will notify you if you’ve accidentally blocked out Google and other search engines from crawling your site.

You can also use the diagnostics tool to spruce up your search listings with better titles and meta descriptions for your pages. One way the tool does this is by providing a list of all of your website’s pages with the same tags, enabling you to click on the duplicate tags so that you can modify them accordingly.

The Statistics Tool
Using the statistics tab under the Webmaster Tools, you can find out how Google users are getting to your site. It allows you to track incoming traffic, and view the top Google search queries that your site appears in.

The statistics function is extremely helpful when paired with other services, such as Google Analytics, since it enables you to view which “off-site” links are providing you with the most traffic.

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How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO: Generating Search Terms through the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Trends

While it seems that Google has been steadily pumping out different applications for generating search terms, there are two core services that will help you identify the best keywords and topics to integrate throughout your site:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: This tool offers keyword suggestions based on the terms you enter or based on your site’s content. It provides statistics on the number of people who search for that search term monthly, as well as how many advertisers compete for the term. It also gives you the option of three different result views:

1. Broad match: This view will give you all of the search phrases that include the particular keyword. For example, a broad match result for “auto transport” might include “car shipping” or “auto transport pricing.”

2. Phrase match: The phrase match view will provide results with the keywords in the same order you entered them. In this case, the query for “smartphone apps” might generate search terms such as “smartphone apps for iPhone” or “smartphone apps for business.”

3. Exact match: Unlike the other options, exact match will show you data on the exact search term, without variation.

One of the biggest advantages of the Adwords Keyword Tool, says Docherty, is that it lets you view and exploit the competition for certain topics, especially if your site is content-driven. “The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is something I use on almost a daily basis,” he says, “especially for gleaning ideas for articles to blog about on my site.”

Google Trends: Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see how often terms are searched for over a period of time. By providing a view of search terms on a line graph, the tool can help you to predict traffic volume for certain keywords, recognize certain seasons where terms are most popular, and locate the country where your primary search terms appear most.

“It’s a good way to learn what people are and will be talking and searching about,” says Docherty. “Even when I’m looking for domains, it gives me a bird’s-eye-view for finding something good to build a site around.”

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How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO: Measuring Traffic and Conversion with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a valuable tool for understanding how people use your website. One of its many uses is the bounce rate, for example, which informs you of how many visitors click away from your site before navigating to the other pages. “This is a very important number because it tells you how effective your landing pages are at pulling visitors deeper into the site,” says Dawkins of Trace Media.

With this type of information, you can change or include certain keywords throughout your site content to make sure visitors that land there, stay there, because they’ve found what they’re looking for.

This leads to another important feature of Google Analytics: the ability to pair your findings with other Google tools. Once you’ve gathered the necessary information from Google Analytics, you can use the data in conjunction with Google’s Website Optimizer, for example, which enables split testing of modified pages. After you’ve made improvements to a page, you can set the Website Optimizer so that a certain amount of viewers see the old version of the page, and use Google Analytics to compare and analyze the results.

Using this combination of Google’s offering of free tools, you can tackle myths about the difficulty of SEO and handle a considerable portion of its implementation on your own. But throughout your process, Docherty says, always keep in mind that content is, indeed, king. “If you see that people are searching for a certain term that isn’t extensively covered on your website, maybe it’s worthwhile to churn out a couple more pages on that topic,” he says. “It really comes down to thinking about content.”

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Millions of people online struggle every single day trying to master the art of creating content and having it reach the first page of Google. This is what every webmaster would like to see happen, but the majority will never see any real results from their work. The problem with most people who attempt to optimize their web presence for search engines is they think SEO is tricky missing the most basic parts of how to reach the top of major search engines. Once you get the basics of SEO down you will be able to reach the top of all the major search engines for any term you would like to do well for. The most important aspect for any webmaster is creating content worth being on the first page. I know many will tell you that backlinks or keywords are the key to search engine results, but if your content is crap then you can forget about getting the first page.

I found good content really helps with the creation of my website paid emails. If you think about what your niche is needing then develop a Url which really explains your website and is usually a wanted key term success will come naturally. Of course it is a good idea to really work hard researching your topic when creating the content. One focus should always be on the front burner when creating a new web presence and that is to create your presence for the user rather than search engines. You must realize that search engines spend millions developing technologies that find the best website for their users. If your web presence has been built for your visitors search engines will see that and will rank your website nicely.

Even though the most important aspect of SEO is developing your presence for visitors rather than search engines there are still a few things you can do to give your website a boost. First it is good to know what search engines look at when ranking your website. The most important thing in their eyes is trying to figure out what your content is about. You can help search engines by creating good titles that explain your content nicely. If your content is about how to make money online free then title your page how to make money online free. If you want to rank well for a certain term then make sure your website fits that term and then place the term in your title and within your content. The second issue when trying to rank well is backlinks. Search engines scan the entire web looking at the links from one site to another. If your URL is on many different websites across the web it will be seen as a vote of confidence from their websites. Those links tell others that hey this guy is ok Google you can trust him. If you get enough links then Google will trust your web presence and rank you nicely.

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This is not an article to tell you not to bother with some of the following techniques, as I’m sure different SEO’s will have seen different successes come from many different areas. But through my carrier I have optimized many sites, and through research and development there are some which don’t have the same influence as they did 18, 12 and even 6 months ago – and I’d suggest that you spend less time on these things. With the ever changing faces of Google, i.e. caffeine, mayday and brands update it seems that the algorithm has simplified, concentrating more on key areas and less on peripherals. Here are some ideas that I’d suggest to any site owners. W3c Validation – Although a valid web page is always going to work and display more efficiently I have not seen any evidence to suggest it has any impact on overall rankings. Therefore don’t spend a fortune in time or money trying to eradicate every last error that has probably been in your markup since inception. Description and Keywords Meta Tags – Google have stated (in not so many words) that these are no longer used to factor a websites rankings, I’d always suggest using keywords within the description as a click through exercise as much as anything else. For my line of work, keywords such as “auto transport” and “car shipping” are important to getting my page recognized. Rather than stuffing my page full of these keywords – or any keywords for that matter – I pay close attention to the density of each keyword and try not to overdo it. Creating the perfect page is like creating the perfect recipe, too much of any ingredient can make the whole page bad. Keyword Stuffing – Although content is still vitally important, gone are the days of pushing to get a keyword in every sentence, Google’s semantic indexing appears to be more accurate than ever so user friendly content is much more acceptable. PageRank Sculpting – Through the Nofollow attribute webmasters were attempting to push PageRank to important pages, to dispel this technique Google changed the way nofollow works. Now a nofollowed link will be seen as a non-existent link and therefore sculpting is no longer possible. Reciprocal Linking – Another one that Google has publically come out and stated their disdain for! It comes back to the old argument of usability and serving the site visitors, personally I have seen success from reciprocal linking but there were other factors that could have influenced the power of these links. General rule, don’t bother. Paid Links – God knows how Google goes about finding these, but they do. My advice is to only pay for a link if it is from a themed site to yours, were your link will actually be of use to someone reading that site. I hope these have been useful, as I say at the top this is just a guide from what I have personally seen. Next time I will be discussing the core factors that influence great rankings.

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