Use Google Search Like an SEO (or like a Google geek)

Since entering the search marketing industry I’ve realized that there’s a lot more to Google search functionality than I had used before. I used to think that I was a pretty efficient Google searcher, using general key-terms at the start, and then adding in more specific key-terms to narrow down my search. Who knew that there were actually specific modifiers that you could use?

The [define:] modifier-
This is definitely my favorite search modifier that I use most often (because my vocabulary stinks; and is probably getting worse the longer that I’m here in  China), and helps me to save face by having a quick way to look up those tough SAT terms that I should have studied harder for; heh.

The [site:] modifier-
Using the sit modifier, you can tell Google that you want your search results come from a specific website. So if you were wanted to search my website for any time I talk about Hong Kong, you could use [hong kong site:duncanleung.com].
If you’re doing research for a paper on relativity, and you want to search educational sites, you can also do searches on [relativity site:.edu].

The [cache:] modifier-
There have been instances at work when I need to see if Google has actually crawled and indexed a website. When Google sends out it’s spiders/crawlers to index the web, it takes an image of the pages it visits and uses these pages to determine the content of the page. These stored images are also used if the original page isn’t available. Using the search modifier [cache:duncanleung.com] will bring up the cached/stored page, and will let you know if it been crawled and indexed.

The [inanchor:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the anchor text of other pages, to link to the website. Using the search modifier [inanchor:plumber] will bring up websites that are linked to with the keyword plumber in the anchor text.

The [intitle:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the title text of the pages. Using the search modifier [inanchor:Beijing] will bring up websites that are indexed by Google that use the keyword Beijing in the title text.

The [inurl:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the URL of the pages. Using the search modifier [inanchor:pets] will bring up websites that are indexed by Google that use the keyword pets in the URL text.

Granted, these are definitely modifiers that I probably wouldn’t use outside of SEO work, and for day-to-day casual searches on [best wireless laptop mice], I’ll actually just be plugging in keywords to refine my search.

I’ll end this post one one last tidbit that I picked up somewhere. If you’re looking to do a comparison on a product or service, you can try the search form ["better than iphone"], including the quotation marks, and that search will bring up results on where people have posted up their experiences using the product, and have made a recommendation on a better product or service.

Hope this wasn’t too geeky of a post!

-Duncan