SEO has completely evolved over the past few years, especially if you’re looking to rank on Google. But the thing is that not many would bother looking beyond Google to get organic traffic to their site, simply because Google completely dominates the search engine industry.
If the current estimates are anything to go by, Google gets as much as 78% of worldwide search volume. Here are some other interesting facts about how Google has drastically improved as a search engine over the past couple decades:
From taking about a month to crawl 50 million pages in 1999, Google took less than a minute to do the same task in 2012
As many as 16% to 20% of search queries Google gets every day are completely new to it
It takes 1000 computers to be used for 0.2 seconds to answer a single search query
Basic Search Operators and Punctuations
These search operators can come in handy when doing basic niche or competitor research. So without further ado, let’s walk you through these search operators and punctuations.
Site: This search operator lets you find all the pages of a particular site. Example: site:wikipedia.org.
Link: This helps you find all pages that are linking to a particular page. So for instance, if you want to find all pages linking to youtube.com, you need to put “link:youtube.com” (the quotes are not needed) into Google search.
Related: This would pull up all sites that are related to the one you search for using this search operator.
OR: This lets you find pages on the web that are talking about multiple things or words. Example: SEO OR web design.
Info: This gets you a lot of information about a particular page, including its cached version, related sites, as well as pages that are talking about similar topics.
Cache: This precisely lets you see what Google saw the last time they crawled the site.
Now, let us take a quick look at some of the important punctuations you can use for finding exactly what you’re looking for.
Using @ helps you find all social media results. Example:@justinbieber.
Using $ helps you find products that are in the price range you’re looking for.
# returns the trending topics.
Putting – (dash) in front of a word while searching for something on Google excludes results for that word. It can be used for sites as well. For example, jaguar speed-car excludes results about Jaguar car, and seo-wikipedia.org excludes results from wikipedia.org.
Using quotes in your search query will help you narrow down your search results to pages that contain those specific words.
* allows you to search for wildcards or unknown words. Example: "largest * in the world".
To search for products or other things in a particular price range, you can put “..” between them. Example: coffee maker $50..$100.
Advanced Search Operators
There are also many advanced search operators as shared through the infographic. Using them helps you go a long way in coming up with advanced and highly effective SEO strategies.
Brandon Leibowitz, owner of SEO Optimizers, has been involved with digital marketing since 2007 with an emphasis on search engine optimization. He runs a sports blog as well called shralpin.com. His knowledge and advice has helped countless people improve their online presence.
