Top Ten FREE SEO Tools for 09/14/10 09/27/10 Register Here

SEO for Google - Advanced Google SEO Keywords Tips

Most people just plug a word into Google, hit search, and off they go. But did you know that there are advanced search features to Google search? These short cuts are not just useful for searching, they are useful for search engine optimization - especially SEO keyword discovery.

By Jason McDonald Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group. Posted: November 27, 2009

Contents:

Advanced Search for Google SEO
Special Google Characters
Before the Colon

Advanced Search for Google SEO

Google is the world's most popular, and most powerful, search engine. Most people just hit a search term and hit 'Google Search' and off they go. This is true as well for SEO researchers - - people seeking to optimize their websites to get to the top of Google, Yahoo, or Bing. But did you know that Google has advanced search capabilities? And that even beyond the advanced search form, there are shortcuts and special characters that you can use - especially for keyword discovery?

First of all, let's just look at the Advanced Search feature in Google. To get there go to the Google home page, and click on Advanced Search to the right of the search box. That opens up a much more detailed form, and you can play around with all the search parameters you can now define. For SEO purposes, your best option is to click the plus sign next to Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more. Then, where it says Where your keywords show up - you have the options of TITLE, URL, and in Links. The most important are the first two - you can use this to find competitors who have your keywords in their TITLE or URLs. (Link discovery isn't that great in Google, and you are better off using the Yahoo Site Explorer Tool).

Special Google Characters

Beyond the advanced search form, which is most useful for SEO keyword discovery for competitor TITLE and URL's, lies the undiscovered country of special characters for use in Google. These are truly SEO gold. The first special character is the ~, or Spanish tilda key. Did you learn this in High School Spanish? Never mind, it has a special meaning in Google searches: find related words. So, for example, if you are doing keyword discovery for a search term like mortgage, do a search for ~mortgage on Google and Google returns the related terms in the search results = pay attention to the bold terms in the returned search results. This is Google telling you which terms are synonyms or closely related to your term, mortage. To do this for a phrase simply use your quotation marks as in ~"loan modification" means tell me all the related search terms to loan modification. It does seem to work best with single keywords, however.

• The tilda (~), in sum, is a great discovery tool for finding related search terms.

Next to the tilda lies the asterisk. It acts as a wildcard and allows you to find words that often appear between or next to your target keywords. If you do a search for Flower * Buy, Google returns all sorts of searches that have Flower <some other word> Buy, and note how it uses smart synonyms and gets your purchase as well as buy (which you could learn with the tilda command above).

• The asterisk (*), in sum, is a great discovery tool for finding terms that often appear in phrases next to your target keywords.

Before the Colon

Google also has a number of advanced search features that you activate by placing special words before a colon. Here are some examples.

Search Query:	What it Tells Google To Do:
site:jasonmcdonald.org	Google, tell me what URL's are in your index for this site. Is it indexed or not, and if so which pages?
intitle:"seo training"	Google, search for pages that have the words "seo training" in the TITLE tag.
related:www.eg3.com	Google, search for pages that are related to eg3.com.
inanchor:SEO	Google, search for sites that use this term in their anchor tags.
link:eg3.com	Google, search for sites that link to this site (eg3.com). Note: Yahoo site explorer is much better for this function.

You can click on any of the links above to see these searches in Google. Then, take your own domain or that of a competitor and play around with these search operators. Some of these can be quite powerful when added to a search term. For example, if you are interested in seeing the most powerful page on a competitor's site, use the phrase site:embedded.com FPGA to query the site embedded.com to determine its most powerful page for the term FPGA. (These are hi-tech search terms, but they will work with any). This information tells you which page of your own site, or a competitor, you should emulate for a given keyword string. In addition for each of these, you can use quotes to do the search for a phrase as in inanchor:"search engine optimization".

What I recommend is that you use these operators, and then find competitors that you are interested in. Then in Firefox, do a view source plus a CTRL+F for Find. Type in the term you are investigating and then highlight all. You can then easily view all the occurrences of your keyword, rather easily. These are great ways to reverse engineer competitors!

You can read more about SEO for Google Using Search Operators from Google itself. Note that they do not reference the ~ (Tilda), however! Also check the Google Cheatsheet .