Monday, June 14, 2010

5 Google Search Tricks for SEO

  1. “intitle:”/”allintitle:” Start your query with this tag and follow with your keywords to see who is using good SEO by targeting these keywords in their title tag. Using only “intitle” will show pages with title tags containing any of the keywords you search for, and “allintitle” will only show pages with title tags containing all the keywords. Doing your search with this tool will help you determine who is tightly targeting your keywords by using them in the title tag.
  2. “inanchor:”/”allinanchor:” When trying to find what backlinks any particular page has, there are several options. Google itself will not display every backlink, but using this tag can help you determine who is using the searched keyword in their anchor text for backlinks. This can be used to find both your own site’s anchor text use and how your competition is doing with anchor text.
  3. “intext:”/”allintext:” If you’re trying to determine which pages are using your searched keywords most effectively in the page content, this is your tag. Results here will display which pages are using the target keywords most in their visible content.
  4. “link:” This is another tag you can use when doing backlink research. When you use this tag with a domain or a full page URL you can see what pages Google has listed that are linking to this page. Again, Google will not list all backlinks, but this can give you a quick rundown of backlinks to specific pages.
  5. “site:” This is a tag that is often missed for its true value. When you use this tag and follow it with a domain name, it will display all pages that Google’s robots have crawled. If, in addition to this, you add keywords – it will display only pages inside that domain that match the keyword query. This is an easy way to determine if Google has cached a specific page, or for finding out relevant information within a particular domain. You can even do a partial search with this tag to find out all sites of a certain class that match your query. For example, typing “site:.edu” will list all relevant results that only have domains with the “.edu” extension.

Using any (or all) of these tags can help you in your SEO research quite nicely. They are valuable tools to research competition or even measure your own levels of progress.

This guest post is by Eric Gesinski who does Tulsa website design and search engine optimization. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite tips. Read more articles by Eric.

No comments: