In a matter of a couple of short years, the Google.com search engine has become the world’s favorite way to find what they’re looking for online.
Now, most of you who are reading this are saying “Duh”, but let me ask you this: Do you REALLY know how to use Google and get the most out of this incredible search technology?
Hopefully, these tips will help you find EXACTLY what you want the next time you head on over to “Google Land” and start searching.
To start, unlike most search engines, Google does not care if your search term is in UPPER or lower case. In fact, it can even be MiXeD case and the search results will be identical no matter how you type in your term.
The Google GOLDEN Rule: BE SPECIFIC!
When using the Google search engine, you must be specific in what you ask and HOW you ask it to get the results you desire.
How do you be specific?
Let’s say you are interested in finding out more about the field of Direct Response Marketing. To search for that exact phrase you put “quotes” around the phrase like this: “direct response marketing”. This forces Google to cough up search results with those exact words in that specific order, only.
If you didn’t use quotes and just typed in direct response marketing, you would get results that included the words: direct, response and marketing mixed in with the MORE SPECIFIC results of the precise phrase “direct response marketing”.
(BTW…….for those of you who are used to searching by putting the word “and” between all your search words, with Google, it’s not necessary. Google automatically “thinks” like that by default.)
You can use the “or” feature on Google. For example: “direct response marketing” or “direct response advertising” and you will get combined results for both exact phrases. The word “or” can be replaced with the “pipe” ( | ) symbol (the symbol above the “” forward slash on your keyboard) to achieve the same results.
Now, let’s say you want to search for articles written about the subject of Direct Response Marketing. You can use the Google “require” feature and have a specific word included in the search just by adding a “+” sign in front of the keyword you want included.. For example you would type: “direct response marketing” +articles and the results would give you articles about Direct Response Marketing.
You can also “exclude” a certain word from your searches by using the “-” (minus sign) like: “direct response marketing” -fees which would give results about Direct Response Marketing excluding “fees”.
Whenever you can, try to combine these three symbols (quotes, plus and minus signs) into a single search to give you even more targeted results.
Now, go practice on Google using these simple tips and meet us back here next time for Part Two when we offer tips about some of the more “advanced” and “juicy” features you can implement to get the most out of your searches on the world’s most frequently used search engine: Google.com
Google has some advanced search options which come in quite handy, depending on what items you may be searching.
TITLE SEARCH: Allows you to search for pages and sites that have specific words or phrases in their title. For example:
intitle: “direct response marketing”
This search would only give you results of sites that have that particular phrase in their title.
SITE SEARCH: Gives you the opportunity to search pages ONLY within a specific site or domain (or using the “negative” results technique from Part One you can “exclude” results from a specific domain or site as well). For example:
“lead generation” site:direct-response-marketing.net
This search would only provide results for the phrase “lead generation” from the site direct-response-marketing.net
URL SEARCHES: Allows you to search for pages or sites that have a specific word or phrase in their URL. For example:
inurl: “direct marketing”
This search would only give you a list of sites that have the exact phrase “direct marketing” in their URL.
To do a real power search, try combining a couple of the above techniques into one search like:
intitle: “direct response marketing” -site: ebay.com
This search would give you results for your selected phrase, found in a title, but not on ebay.com Neat, huh?
RELATED SEARCHES: Let’s say you want to search for sites (competitors ? ) to a specific site. Once again we’ll use our own site as an example: related: direct-response-marketing.net
This search will show sites that have related content and subject matter to the site which you typed into after “related:”
GOOGLE LIMITS: Google does have some limits and one of those is the actually number of keywords you can search on at the same time. That limit is (10). Type in anymore than (10) keywords and the subsequent words will not be included in your search and thus, are irrelevant.
Common words are ignored by Google such as: “a, about, an, and, are, as at, be, by, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the this, to, we, what, when, where, which, with”.
You can override this limitation by putting a plus sign ( + ) in front of any of the above words when using them in a search phrase.
WILDCARDS: A wildcard search uses the asterisk sign ( * ) (the one above the #8 on your keyboard) to represent other non-specific characters or words. For example: “direct response *” would turn up results for:
direct response marketing direct response advertising direct response television direct response radio (and a few more).
You can use the wildcard symbol ( * ) and override the Google keyword limit and actually search for MORE than (10) keywords at a time because the ( * ) is not counted as a word.
Now, go practice on Google using these advanced tips and meet us back here next time for Part Three when we offer tips about some MORE “advanced” and “juicier” features you can use to get the most out of your searches on the world’s most frequently used search engine: Google.com
Andrew Wroblewski and Steve Robichaud have been helping
people and businesses learn how to effectively use the
power of the internet since Moby Dick was a minnow.
To contact them and/or to learn more visit or write:
http://www2.direct-response-marketing.net
email: admin@direct-response-marketing.net
