eHows on First Page of Google Results

So I know there is a lot of advice on the web specifically about how to get your eHows ranked well on the first page of Google. I'm not going to claim that my method is 100% new or unheard of, but it works well and I figured I'd share it.

There are a lot of quantitative tools out there (Google Keyword Tool, browser plugins, etc.) to help you evaluate keyword competition and whether you should go for it. The strategy I'm going to describe is qualitative and relies on your intuition logic as well.

In the last month, most people reading this probably have Googled something that they were trying to figure out. Perhaps you were trying to find out how to do something on your computer or iPhone. Or maybe you were trying to diagnose some issue with your car. For any given topic (especially very specific ones), some of the most knowledgeable sites on the internet are often forums or discussion boards. There are discussion boards for just about everything out there, from second generation Nissan Altimas to vintage polaroid cameras.

Fortunately for people such as myself trying to make money off eHow, these forums often don't have the most authority on the web or in the eyes of Google. Thus, when you Google a given keyword and find that some of the highest search results happen to be forums, this should be seen as a potential eHow article opportunity. Because while these forums may be filled with very useful knowledge, they are easy to "cut in line" so to speak when you are leveraging the authority of eHow due to their low web authority.

**Slight Tangent**


And that's basically what you're doing when writing on eHow. Sure you could create a how to post on your own site or blog about something, but then you have to compete with the established sites such as the eHows of the world. By writing a how to on eHow, you are essentially piggybacking off their web authority and using it to conquer certain keywords. This is evident in the ability of a well written/researched eHow post to rank in the first page of Google results for the targeted keyword by the next day.

Back to the strategy. Take a look at the screenshot below. Two of the top three results for the keyword "adjust iphone ringer volume" are forum results.


To me, this says this could be a good opportunity to write an eHow going after this keyword. In this case I happened to be searching for this keyword on my own (not really but pretend I was). However, if I was dry for eHow ideas, I might surf over to some forums (especially forums about technology or other popular categories) and read titles of discussions looking for hot topics. Also, topics that you find repeated often in forums indicate it is something highly searched for. In any case, once you find the keyword google it and see what comes up. Are they well established sites like cnn.com, about.com, etc. or are they weak forums and new/amateur blogs (like this one)? Unlike mixed drinks, weaker is better in this case.

The next step is to see if someone on eHow has already written a post about it. I'm personally not much of a fan of trying to compete with other eHow writers who have already written on a topic. Moreover, duplicate articles are more likely to get purged when eHow does a clean up.

More than likely, if you do not see an eHow on the first page of search results for a long tail keyword such as these, no one has done one yet. Obviously if you have search Google for "credit card", you will not see an eHow on the first page and yet there are untold hundreds of eHows relating to credit cards. But "credit card" is one of the most competitive keywords imaginable. For a long tail keyword such as "adjust iphone ringer volume", if there's not on eHow on the first page it probably doesn't exist.

So to summarize in a few easy steps, this method goes something like this:

1. Identify keyword phrase, either out of your own necessity or by perusing forums and looking for hot and/or repeat topics.
2. Google keyword phrase and study results. Are they well established sites or mostly forums and other new/weak sites?
3. Determine if someone on eHow has already written on that keyword.
4. If the search results are weak and no one on eHow has gone after that keyword, go for it.

Like I said this is not a quantitative method nor an exact science, but I find it works much of the time. There are of course many other ways to research keywords but I like this one because it is relatively quick and it generates keywords out of people's necessity for them (either your own and others).

-eHow, Captain eHow