Getting the best of Google’s search results
We all want to rank well within Google’s search engine listings and get our websites to the top of the rankings for as many keywords as possible, but from the point-of-view of a user, how can you get the most relevant search results?
There are many different tips and tricks that can be used to get very specific results and flush out all of the unwanted results to only give you the most relevant and up-to-date information. A lot of users don’t take advantage of the use of the different search operators that can be used and many users don’t even know about them so we have detailed a few of them below:
The Minus Sign (-)
Using the minus sign (-) as a prefix to a keyword that you type will remove any results from the listings that are related to this word. For example, if we were to type ‘SEO Birmingham -wowinternet’ then this would show all the results for SEO Birmingham without our website showing in the listings. This can be really handy when returning large amounts of data with a very open subject.
Specific Website Searching
If you would like to search for results only within a certain website then you can use the ‘site:’ operator to do this. For example, if you wanted to only find pages on web design within our website then you would search: ‘web design site:www.wowinternet.co.uk’. This can be extremely useful when looking for something specific to do with a certain company or site.
You can also search for certain types of websites using this same method, for example, if you were looking for results from educational or government bodies you could use ‘site:edu’ or ‘site:gov’ and it will only bring results from sites that have .gov or .edu domains.
File Type Specific Searching
One of the most useful search operators is the ‘filetype:’ operator that allows you to specify exactly what type of file you want to return in the search results, whether it be a PDF, HTML, PHP, DOC, etc. For example, if you wanted to find a PDF report that is about SEO then you could do the following search: ‘seo filetype:pdf’.
Using Multiple Operators
By incorporating a range of different operators you are able to create very specific and advanced search criteria. An example of a very advanced search query would be:
‘facebook page site:www.wowinternet.co.uk filetype:html’
This would search for all HTML pages on our website that are related to Facebook pages; the results are shown below:
As you can see, using these little tips, you can get some really specific results so try it out and hopefully this will help you out!
