After making a website for my family and showing them what search terms bring up our site, I realised they don't really know how to use search engines to find what they want. I thought these people knew a lot about computers because they have had one for as long as I can remember. If no one in my family knows how to search, there are probably a lot of other people who don't know how to search either. Even if you know how to use a computer, this article will help you because you need to know how to look for what you want on the Internet. You already know that not all of the results are always what you want.
I just finished reading a newsletter that had some interesting facts in it. Did you know that when someone searches for something and doesn't find it, they think their keywords are wrong? After reading this article, you'll be able to find what you're looking for, unless it doesn't exist, which is unlikely.
How to look for something on a website
We're going to use Google as an example for the rest of this article. Let's say we're looking at www.imaginarysite.com and want to find out which pages have the word "financial" on them. If you typed "financial site:www.imaginarysite.com" into Google, it would give you all the results from www.imaginarysite.com. This would be helpful if the website you were looking at didn't have a search option.
"Finding websites that link to yours or another"
An interesting tool is one that lets you find sites that link to your website or a competitor's website. Some of the websites that link to your competitors' sites will also link to yours. To find links, you have to type in link: imaginarysite.com. This will give you a list of all the sites that Google has indexed that have links to your site. If those sites haven't been indexed, they won't be on the list.
How to find definitions
This kind of search is interesting. For instance, you might be reading a website about marketing and see the word "blog" a lot. You have no idea what a blog is at all. Then, to find out, you would type define: blog into Google. If you don't know a technical term, this search is the best way to find it.
How to find the right words
Use quotation marks to find exact words that are in that order or that are grouped together, like "website design" or "purple monkey habits." I think this search is the best tool out there. When I'm looking for articles and want to see how many websites have my article, this is a good use. I would search for "search engine basics," which is the title of the article. Since there are a lot of websites with those three words together, I would add "Alicia" at the end without the quotation marks. Give it a try and see what happens. This is especially helpful when you want to get more specific results.
Find sites that have a keyword in their address.
Type allinurl:webdesign or allinurl:web design, for example, to find keywords that are in the url (website address). Different things would happen in each case. In the first case, the results would be websites with the word "webdesign" (as one word) in the address. The second will help you make a website that works (with a space between the two words). This search would be especially helpful if you were looking for the Pink Lime salon but could only remember that it had pink in the name and was a salon. You would type allinurl:pink, salon, which would bring up all results with the word salon and the word pink in the URL.
Finding your keyword and the words that are similar to it
Use the "" sign on your keyboard, which you can find if you look for it. You can usually find it on your keyboard to the left of the 1 key. The name for it is the tilde sign. If you typed "holistic coach," that would be an example. Holistic coach, natural coach, massage coach, and a few others would be among the results.
Sometimes it's hard to search the Internet and find what you're looking for. People often search using only two or three keywords, which doesn't always give the results you want. The best way to search is to use a few keywords, and if that doesn't get you the results you want, try adding another keyword until you get the results you want without having to look through pages of search results.
