The job of an SEO professional includes many things from doing tireless research on the keywords, writing quality articles and communicating with the clients. Of the three, finding out the right keywords using research plays a major role in the success of an SEO campaign. That’s why most SEO professionals prefer to spend hours on finding the right keywords before starting a new SEO campaign.
SEO people use different tools to find the keyword data for a campaign, but the one which the most skilled professionals will recommend is the search engines themselves. Using advanced search operators on search engines like Google, SEO professionals can get the right keywords, competitor’s details, and a lot more of useful information.
Let’s have a look at the top three effective search queries which SEO professionals use to dig up information for their SEO campaigns.
1) Site:<url>
The “site:<url>” is the mostly used operator on the search engines. Although this is a basic operator, most SEO professionals love it because it provides the most useful information. While using this operator with the URL of a website, the search engines will return with the list of all the indexed pages of the website.
By comparing the numbers of the indexed pages and the actual number of pages in the website, it is easy to figure out the website mistakes (if there are any) and the way search engines are crawling. The results will also show the title and descriptions of all the pages of your website used by the search engines.
The site:operator can also be used to find out the list of pages with a specific keyword in a website. The results will show the list of your websites indexed pages on the search engines which are relevant to the specific keyword. Using it, the SEO professionals can easily find out which pages carry more relevancies to the keywords used with the search operator. Take a look at this Search Engine Land article to find out the other advantages of the site: operator.
Example: site:yourdomain.com, site:yourdomain.com “specific keyword”
2) Intitle: ”search term”
All the skilled SEO professionals know that using the target keyword in the title tag of your website plays an important role in the success of the campaign. Since this is a universal rule in on-page optimization, everyone who are targeting a specific keyword for their campaign, will use it in their website title. So, by using the intitle: operator, it is easy to find out the list of the competitors who are targeting the same keyword.
When using this intitle: “search term” operator, the results will show up the list of all the competitors and find out whether the competition is mild or high. If the result shows up big brands, the competition will be extremely high and it would be almost impossible to break through. The operator can also help SEO professionals to compare different keywords and find out the right one for their campaign. This intitle: operator works on all search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Example: intitle: “target keyword”
3) Info:<url>
The info: operator is mostly used by SEO professionals while doing competitive research. Using the operator, SEO people can find out the page’s title, description, most recently cached version of the URL, pages that have content similar to the one at URL, pages that are linking to the URL, and pages that contains the URL in them. Since this operator works on Google, don’t try this out on Yahoo and Bing.
Example: info: yourdomain.com, info:yourdomain.com/page2
SEO is similar to a war and SEO professionals are using their search engine knowledge as “sword” to improve client’s website rankings and traffic. By understanding these search operators and by making use of them effectively, SEO professionals can get a competitive edge over others and win the battle.
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By Sathishkumar Varatharajan
Sathishkumar Varatharajan is the author of this article. Sathish owns a SEO Services company, Kudo Metrics in India. He is helping businesses to get better rankings and good amount of traffic using his SEO expertise.