Much of what SEO professionals do on a every day basis is research. When starting a new project, the center of attention usually begins with researching the right keywords for the battle. It’s easy to spend hours compiling a applicable and strategic keyword list.
But as any skilled SEO can say to you, the research doesn’t end there. The best gear to gather useful keyword data aren’t third-party tools; they’re the advanced search operators that the search engines give for power users to narrow their search results and find exactly what they’re looking for. SEO professionals can use these same question mark operators to dig into the competition or their clients’ sites, finding gold nuggets of information that newbies can’t.
While Google has at least a dozen higher search operators, the following five are my personal favorites.
site: <url>
Great use for this operator is to search for particular keywords within a particular site. This will result in all of the pages containing those keywords that Google has indexed from that site. Also, these pages will be sorted according to how perceives the relevance of each page for that question. This is helpful for figuring out what pages are your strongest contenders for each of your keywords.
In addition to Google, this operator works with both Yahoo! and Bing.
Search with quotes
Example: “dogfood”, “dog” food or “dog” “food”
The original use of the quotation mark as a query operator was to let people tell Google to search exactly for the words in between the quotation marks. Using our examples above, the first one would show results for dog food, where the two words must appear in closely that order in the search results? If “dog” is the significant word and you don’t mind variants of the word “food,” like meal or treat, then the second example would be a good choice. If you want to see results that include both “dog” and “food” but you don’t mind whether they appear adjacent to each other, then putting each word in quotes like the third sample above would be a high-quality query.
Using quotes approximately your search query can help you determine if your pages are being indexed for the search terms you’re optimizing for, and it helps you identify opposing sites.
link:<url>
Example: link:example.com or link:example.com/page1
There was a time when using this query operator would yield the results of all pages with links to the given URL. Unfortunately, Google has stopped this practice and now only provides a sampling of the sites that contain links to the supplied URL. If you’re difficult to get a complete list of links to your website, use Google Webmaster Tools.
While this query operator helps you get a picture of your site’s incoming links, the real value is when you research the links of your struggle. Since you don’t have access to their Webmaster Tools account, using the link: operator will help you get an idea of at least some of their incoming links so you can better plan your link building strategy.
Note: there are tools such as Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO that will give you a much more entire view of any URL’s link profile, but they do cost money. For beginning and free competitive research, the link: operator is a valuable resource. This operator will also work in both Bing and Yahoo!, but Yahoo! does require http:// to be used at the beginning of the URL.
intitle: “search term”
Example: intitle:”dog food”
One of the most significant elements of on-page SEO is to ensure that the title tag of each page is optimized for your specific keywords. Since most persons know this, there’s a good bet that any pages which include your keyword in the title tag are potential competitors who have also embattled that keyword for their own SEO campaign.
This operator will give you a look at everyone you’re challenging against for those keywords. When the search results are displayed, you can take a look at the number of results to see if the keyword you’re targeting has heavy competition or relatively mild competition
info: <url>
Example: info:example.com or info:example.com/page1
The info: operator is used by Google only, so don’t try this one on Bing or Yahoo!. This operator provides you with some important and useful information that can assist with competitive research. A search query using this operator will go back the page’s title, its description, and the ability to see:
• The most current cache of the URL
• Pages that have parallel content to the URL
• Pages that link to the URL
• Pages that link from the site
• Pages that hold the URL in them
Concluding Word
Whether you’re just beginning a campaign for a new customer or performing competitive research on an existing movement, these search operators can help you gain a competitive edge. SEO professionals wield their knowledge of search engines as their “sword” in the daily fight of improving rankings and website traffic for clients. As an SEO professional, accepting how to use these operators quickly and effectively will help turn the tide of battle in your goodwill.
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