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This post will show you how to search google and see exactly how your site is performing in their search index.  There are a variety of different operators that you can use in the google search box that will allow you to change how google is searching the web.  These operators can be very helpful if you learn to use them correctly.  I’m not going to explain all of the operators, but I will explain the ones that are most relevant to seeing how your site is doing.

The first you should know about is the site operator.  It is fairly simple.  In the google search box type in site:yoursite.com and hit search.  This query is going to show you all of the pages from your site that google has in their index.  If you enter the search and nothing is found, you need to take efforts to get google to index your page.  For that read these 2 posts:

Get your Blog Indexed by Google FAST!!

Get Indexed Ever FASTER!!

The second operator that you should know about is link.  To use this type in link:yoursite.com and hit search.  This will show you all of the links to your site that google has indexed and that you are getting credit for.  Remember the number of relavant links that you have strongly determines what type of search engine traffic you will get.  The more links the better.  You can also use this to investigate your competition.  Take some sites that rank higher than you do on google and see how many links that they have.  You can also investigate all of those pages that they have links on and attempt to get those sites to link to your webpage.

Here are some other basic operators and their functions:

• + (ex: +pa)  This excludes synonyms.  PA will not become Pennsylvania
• - (ex: car -hybrid) This excludes pages that contain hybrid
• “” (ex: “hey buddy”) This searches for the entire phrase and not 2 seperate kws
• * (ex: My * Blog) This is a wild card.  It matched My “anything” blog
• OR (ex: car red OR blue)  Searches for both car red AND car blue, but not car red blue.  MUST be in caps

In another post, I will explain some of the more advanced operators and show some of their uses.

Tags: beginner, google

This entry was posted by Jimmy on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Basic How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.