Search Operator Basics for SEO

Imagine if there was a way to tell Google exactly what you were looking for, in Google’s own language. You could do specific searches and find what you’re looking for, instead of Google’s best guess at what you’re looking for.

By using search operators, you can make searching much more specific, by looking for information from a specific site, files of a certain type, and more. This helps with SEO because you can perform much more in-depth analysis of websites (yours and competitors), and perform more accurate keyword research. To use search operators, type the operator into the search bar, followed by a colon ( : ), the search specific quality, and then your search term.

site:http://www.modomediagroup.com SEO

In this search, you’re searching the Modo Media Group site for anything about SEO. Here are some of the most common search operators, and how they can be used.

Site:
Site is one of the most basic search operators. It allows you to search one particular site for specific information. It can also be used to limit the types of sites the search engine is returning results, returning .edu, .org, or .com sites, for example. It’s a great tool for when you’re performing an SEO audit on a site or when looking for duplicate content.

Related:
You have a website for your online service business, and you want to find sites that are similar to yours. The ‘related’ operator allows you to search for sites that are similar to each other. You could type in related:yoursite.com and find websites that are related to yours, in topic, keywords, and other factors.

InURL, InAnchor, Intititle, Allintext:
Search for specific keywords in the URL, anchor text or title of a web page. This is useful when researching competitors or looking for sites with particular keywords in important areas of a website.

Link:
This will show you all of the sites that are linking to a particular URL. If you wanted to know who was linking to your latest blog post, for example, you might type in something like: link:http://yoursite.com/blog/post-title, and that would pull up a list of any websites that are currently linking to that particular page on your website. This can help you to monitor your website’s incoming links.

Cache:
This allows you to see the most recently indexed version of a website. When you’re monitoring to see how quickly your site is being indexed by a search engine, or if you’re waiting to see how your new SEO site changes have affected your SERP standing, this is the tool to use.

(-) Minus:
Tired of looking for sites about one thing, and finding sites about something else? By using a minus sign (-), you can tell Google to ignore any sites that contain specific words. For example, if you want results for “search engine optimization” but not “social media” or “content”, you would type this into the search field:

“search engine optimization” -“social media” -“content”

(“”) Quotation Marks:
If you want to see sites that match a keyword phrase, and only that phrase, put quotations on either side of the string of keywords. SEO Tips for 2011 can bring up matches that combine all of those words, or most of those words, in any order. They don’t have to be all together, and they don’t have to be in related parts of the content. For example, you may get a page titles “Website Tips” that mentions SEO and was published in 2011. However, when you search for “SEO tips for 2011” the only pages search engines will show are the ones that have that exact phrase. This is a useful trick for keyword research sessions.

Learning how to take advantage of these search operators can make the time you spend doing SEO research go much faster. You can skip past the information you don’t need, and get right into the essential data that you’re looking for. They allow you to speak the language of the search engine, and pull up the pages that you need, instead of the search engine’s best guess at what you might be looking for.

Related posts:

1. Social Search: Google’s Personal Search Results
2. Keywords for Mobile Search
3. How Complicated is Your SEO: Part IV: Using Search Operators
4. How do Search Engines Work?
5. Duck, Duck, Go! How Smaller Search Engines Are Changing the Search Industry