Refining Your Google Search (the basics)
Published on April 29th, 2010.
Are you planning to dive into the world of Search Engine Optimization? There is a lot for you to learn, one of which is the very basic : the search. Each website is crawled by bots and spiders and depending on the search engine, information and data from your site is sandbox-ed and will get listed. Since Google is the frontrunner among the search engines that have made guidelines about how to optimize your weblog or website, we start with the things we rarely use for searches. Using the Google Search bar as a standard, here are several ways they would put forth a search:
Square Brackets denotes a [query]
We are so used to working offline that we carry over several offline practices that may get you inferior search results.
Phrase Search are phrases attributed to “a person” or “part of a title” “words attributed to someone”
The quotation marks would signal that you want each phrase and a more trimmed down search focused on the phrase itself.
Inside a specific [site: ]
You know where you found the article on anti-aging cremes, the thing is you forgot what Item code of the Face Gravity crème was in. The braces and the colon before the website name you need to find out about. [Face Gravity crème: anti-aging.com]
Terms not needed [-]
Terms are connected to some other terms that just muddle up your search. The best thing to put is the hyphen [-] for excluding other terms form the search. For instance, you want to find our about the latest Flip camera that has a USB port [Flip camera-HP printer].
Asking the *unknown
This type of query, the search engine knows what word or words take preceding among the ones you listed. Other words listed with the *word is there to narrow the search but information
you need is on the ones with the *asterisk before it. The *asterisk works on a word and not a string of words.
[Exact + Searches]
symbol before a word, joins it with the word before the + sign. This makes the search more accurate the. Typing and adding+an typing a sentence or a long-worded query.
OR | Option
Putting OR in caps between 2 sets of information you need enable the search engine to search for wither of the 2 sets of information. You can also use the symbol | which done by pressing at the shift key and the backward slash key. Some searches though can’t be [exactly] put nor can Google classify the word: or, in lower case, as a specific alternate search. For the search engine not to misinterpret the query, keep these in mind:
- several words are ignored automatically and are called ‘stop words’. These are ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘for’ phrases or words which are well known and are normally attributed to the term itself.
ex. (the mentalist) the search will not exclude the word ‘the’ since this is a well known movie turned TV series;
- the term Single Ladies doesn’t need the ‘+‘ or the [bracket] for Google to know it’s Beyonce’s song
- sometimes synonyms may replace the original words you put in the query
- language analysis will refine your searches as long as there is sufficient data that the page is deemed relevant ex. Casio baby watches will always result to the Baby G-shock watches by Casio
- Unless you would want a to see product by its series number, the $ must always be put before any number if you are searching for a product being sold at a particular price.
- When using the hyphen: a space before and after indicate you don’t want this term searched on the other hand sans space after the hyphen and a space before the hyphen indicate that these words are strongly -connected
This is the way people at Google have thought of refining searches with the use of punctuation or symbols on your keyboard. The first time anyone would ever have heard about this is during a review on Google’s guidelines.There are several search engines empowering people to make use of the Internet as a reference, yet only Google has set the standard of what a search engine can contribute to website optimization and an easier search process.
Filled under SEO & SEM.