Consider subscribing to my blog's RSS feed. It's sticky
Using specialized Google searches for SEO and competitive research is a pretty simple, but powerful tool. Many times you can improve your ranking for important search phrases by better understanding the construction of pages that rank well ahead of you. Studying and understanding how a well ranked page is optimized and having access to a list of sites that link to these pages will tell you a great deal about what you may need to do to get similar results.
Google has enabled a long list of search shortcuts that will allow you to do all kinds of things besides simply search for a plumber in your town. By adding what Google calls an operator followed by a colon : you can get some pretty interesting research done very quickly.
The following are my 10 favorite web site and SEO shortcuts because they give you a quick look at some of the most competitive search ranking factors.
- site:(get your search results for only one website - this would show pages on Duct Tape Marketing with the word referral) - site:ducttapemarketing.com “referrals”
- link:(find page that link back to a page or entire site) - link:www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog
- info: (find info about a page) - info:www.ducttapemarketing.com
- related: (shows pages that Google think are related to a site) - related:www.ducttapemarketing.com
- cache: (shows what a page looked like in previous version) - cache:ducttapemarketing.com
- filetype:(search for specific filetypes only) marketing filetype:ppt
- allintitle: (search keywords in page title) - allintitle:public relations
- allinanchor: (search for link or anchor text) - allinanchor:get more referrals
- inurl:(restrict search to page URLs) inurl:smallbusiness
- allintext: (words specified in body text) allintext:duct tape
- acronym: (secret to staying young) He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at Apr 01, 08 | 2:25 pm and is filed under Google, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great list John! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for posting these.
I never knew about allintext/allintitle. Those will be handy in tracking down articles that actually talk about the company/product I am seeking and exclude brief name mentions.
I’ll have to use allintitle next time I am trying to find that one specific article in a pile of Google results.
and happyaprilfoolsday to you, too, John!
John,
Truly a wonderful list John. Remarkably effective way to analyze your site as well.
Take care.
James - thanks for noticing my not so subtle joke - I remember reading the original George Plimpton story, yes I’m that old, and thinking it was the greatest literary heist I had ever read.
[...] John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, put up a great post a couple days ago about how to use Google better. Simply put, the better you understand how something works, the easier it is to use (novel thought!) So he put together some great information about how Google search engine works so you can understand better how to use Google Adwords. If you know how people are searching, it is much easier to choose words to bid on and optimize around. To read his article, click here [...]
Very good and practical. I didn’t even know you could do these shortcuts until you shared them back in January at our coaching training….cool! I can see using several of them to cut down search time on Google.
I enjoying knowing new things and then getting to sound like the expert to other people!
Hi, Thanks for the post. it’s very useful.
bugger you got me, I actually went to google and tried for an acronym of my name. In my defense I read this via feed so I read it a day late
Thank you for that list John.
[...] Top 10 Google Search Shortcuts: Very useful tips from Duct Tape Marketing. [...]
It’s worth mentioning though that link: operator doesn’t work as well as Yahoo’s.
Hendry - I think it would be more accurate to say they work differently.
Ooh! That inurl one is great! Never heard of it before! Thanks!
Great article. I think seo professionals often forget how useful those Google shortcuts can be. we always try to find the next great tool when it may be right in front of our noses through Google.
Thank you for a handful of gems. This are great tips. Please let me know if you have any more.
[...] SEO, SEO/PPC, Toolkits — trontr @ 9:52 am Tags: PPC, Search engines, SEM, SEO On April 1st John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, posted his “Top 10 Google Search Shortcut Tips”. I [...]
John,
THanks for sharing those. I very often neglect to check everything that Google offers us. These tools are good for checking up on your competition as well!
Thanks again.
-Jon
These are great for competitive analysis, especially for SEO. You can use the “intitle” “inanchor” search commands together to get a really good idea of how many sites are really gunning for a particular term. Usually when you type in a search query you can some large amount (e.g. 19,000,000) using the intitle or inanchor helps weed out some of the accidental competitors to get a much better idea of the competitive landscape.
Great post John
These are valuable tools for whittling down the clutter to the nitty gritty. The old fashioned way to do SEO without the fancy programs!
Thanks John.
Thanks for the tips. When I get a new toy I read the entire book to know everything. We use Google everyday yet we dont learn how to use it properly, or maybe we just think that is it.
Will share your post.
Enjoy.
[...] ce que vous devez faire pour obtenir des résultats similaires. Voici donc, basé sur un article de John Jantsch, 10 raccourcis de recherche de sites pour le [...]