There are many ways to improve SEO. These three search tips can help you make more informed decisions about your SEO efforts.1. Search to see how many people link to you.
This is a great way to find potential friends and allies you might not even know you have. To find inbound links to your site, enter the following into the search field on Google or Bing:
link:www.yourdomainhere.com or link:yourdomainhere.com
For example, to find all of the people who link to my site, I entered link:digitalfamily.com and then did a second search for link:www.digitalfamily.com. (Thanks to all of you who are linking to my site!)
Tip: make sure you search for both your domain name with and without the www’s, and don’t add a space between the link: and your domain name.
2. Search to see what keywords are working for you (and your competitors)
Here’s a quick and easy way to see what content you (and your competitors) have for any given keyword or keyword phrase. After you see how much content your competitors have, you can create an action plan to build more content and beat them out!
In your Google toolbar or the search box on Google.com type in:
site:website.com Keyword Here
For example, if you wanted to search CNN to see how many pages refer to the election you would type: site:www.cnn.com election
Don’t forget to wear a cool super sleuth outfit to get into the right mindset! I’m thinking something like Inspector Gadget.
Credit: This tip is from the wonderful Jennifer Horowitz, of ecombuffet, who is not only an SEO expert, she knows the guy the created Inspector Gadget.
3. Make sure your content shows up on your site in search results before you share it with others
If you produce content that you share (or syndicate) to other sites, make sure you post it on your site first, and then check to be sure that it has been indexed by Google before you post it anywhere else. New pages on your site won’t show up in Google searches until your site has been indexed, and Google indexes some sites more often than others. That means that even after you post a new page on your site it may not show up in a Google for days or weeks.
Further complicating matters for those of us who share content is the fact that Google doesn’t like to match ‘duplicate’ content in search results. That means if the same article appears on multiple websites, only one of those sites will get credit for it in Google. In general, the only one that will show up in Google search results is the first place that Google finds the content.
Thus, if you want credit for your original content, post it on your own site first, and then search Google to make sure the page has been indexed before you share it with anyone else.
To check to see if a page has been indexed (i.e. added to Google), do this search:
site:www.url.com/pagename.html (or whatever the extension is)
For example, to search for this article on my own site, I just type site: and then copy the URL into the search field on Google, like this site:https://www.digitalfamily.com/tutorials/wordpress-article/three-ways-to-search/
I wonder how long it will take for Google to find this one?
Now this is what I call “actionable intelligence!” Really useful information that I will share with my colleagues.
Thanks!
If your search does not match any documents, try this suggestions
Make sure that all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.
Although it is relatively new domain I have bunch of links, at least from my blogs and sites.
It didn’t work for me. Firefox says the address wasn’t understood. HOw can you have an address that starts with the word link?
Great tips, Janine. Thanks!
Hey Janine, these are very intelligent tips you provided. I’ll make sure I’ll remember these and use it in the future. Keep posting please..