Advanced searching in Google for the SERP/SEO masters

Advanced searching in Google for the SERP/SEO masters

There are some amazing ways to use advanced searches in Google.  For this article, we’ll look at some advanced search methods that are of particular interest to webmasters and SEO/SEM professionals, and which you may not have ever even heard of.  Many of these searches define how the search term is to be located in the search results, which offer a great deal of control over the information you want to have returned.

site:  Example: advanced Google search site: www.seonotepad.com
Use the site: operator to look for search terms only at a particular website.
This operator can be used to find specific listings for a designated website.  It may take a few uses to get the hang of using it effectively, but once you do, you can perform a search for information of any known url , without going to the site, or weeding through unwanted information.

inanchor:  Example: Google Chrome inanchor:web-browser
Will only return results for Google Chrome that contain web-browser in the anchor link.
Use this to actually search for a specified link (anchor) in web pages.  Very useful for finding an item you know you’ve seen before, but can’t remember where you found it.

intext:  Example: Delft intext: wind generator
Will only return results for Delft that contain wind generator in the page text, or content.
This is great to find a block of text in web pages.  For web research this is a valuable timesaver.

intitle: Example: Christmas gift intitle:traditional
Will only return results for Christmas gifts with the word traditional in the page title.
Allows you to search the title of web pages for matching text.  The title is created in the HTML code of a page, and is displayed in the topmost bar of your web browser.

inurl: Example: silverlight inurl:microsoft
Will return results for silverlight only if microsoft is part of the url.
This will let you look through google’s list of urls for matching text.  If you’re reasearching a domain name, or product density, this can be very useful.

There are many more Google operators, from defining words to using Google as a calculator.  And even the ones listed here can be used in more complicated ways than illustrated.  Not to mention that such operators can be used together, allowing you to search a site for specific text within a page that has a certain title.  By mastering the use of advanced Google searches, the Internet stops being a collection of web pages, and becomes a reference collection of phenomenal size.  For the casual web user, these are simple ways to find more precise information, but for someone working in SEM/SE production, they can become valuable tools to analyze data and better create successful websites.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com