How to Get Your eHow Article Into the Top Ten Google Search Results

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By David Sarokin
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Google Suggest

Here's how I've gotten several of my articles into the very top of Google results, very quickly. It's a bit complicated, but it works.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Step 1

Head to Google Suggest at:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

or use the direct link in Resources, below.
Step 2

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Google Suggest is a tool that can be used to identify common search phrases. For instance, a search on How To shows a number of suggestions, and identifies "How To Make a Website" as the most common, with 144 million results (144,000,000).
Step 3

Pay attention, because here's the tricky part.

Play around with Google Suggest by adding letters and letter combinations to 'How to'.

For instance, try searches on:

How to a

How to ab

How to make

How to cre

How to un

How to zo

and so on.
Step 4

There are obviously A LOT of possibilities, so this isn't a one-shot thing. Make it a habit to stop by Google Suggest and play with different letter combinations.
Step 5

What you are looking for are suggestions that have the following characteristics:

1. They are popular search phrases. I try to find ones with more than 50 million results in Google Suggest. Over 100 million is even better. Occasionally, you'll even come across a search with more than a billion results.

2. They don't already have an eHow article with **the exact phrase** as a title.

3. Ideally, there aren't very many (or better yet, aren't any!) Google search results that have the exact phrase as a title, either.

For 2 and 3, you'll have to search for the phrase at eHow, and on Google, and then look over the first few results.
Step 6

Lastly, the phrase should be on a topic you can write an article about. Stretch yourself here. I've written articles on many topics that I don't, personally, know a great deal about. But by paraphrasing good quality materials already available, I've been able to produce equally good quality How-To's that generate a lot of traffic.
Step 7

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Here's an example. A Google Suggest search for:

How to em

shows that How to email (572 million) and How to email pictures (211 million) are really popular search phrases. However, these aren't good candidates, since there are many pages (at eHow and in general searches) that already use these phrases.

However, the results also show that:

How to embed a video

is a popular search (87 million results). Now we're on to something. There is not an eHow article with this exact title, and there are hardly any search results that turn up that exact title either.

Woo hoo!

If you write an article with that exact title, How to Embed a Video, the odds are very good that it will turn up in the Top Ten search results for that popular phrase. It takes about a day for Google to index it and have it show up in results.
Step 8

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I wrote an article, How to Get a Bird Out of the House.

Originally, I titled it, How to Get a Bird Out of Your House, but changed 'Your' to 'the' once I had a good look at the Google Suggest results...click on the image to the left to see what I mean.
Step 9

The Resources section includes links to some articles that I've created this way, and that are doing very well, both in terms of their Google search results, and in terms of traffic here at eHow.

Comments

toby30 said

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on 11/13/2009 good info! I'm going to try this.

on 11/3/2009 I don't know if Google disabled the "number of searches" function from Suggest but I can't seem to get it to work. I have the google tool bar which says it has Google Suggest but I can't get the site count. Does anyone have any suggestions?