Impossible Dreams Media » SEO

Google Search Syntax Tricks

Chris Jones — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:31:15 +0000

Most people when they’re searching for something on the web will simply enter whatever it is into the Google search bar and get the results. Fortunately, Google has become better and better at making sense of what you type and delivering you the most relevant search results. You can pretty much type anything in Google now and it will know what you’re talking about.

That said, sometimes you might need to drill down a little further and be a little more specific with your search.

That’s where search syntax comes into play. If you use special search syntax with Google you can sometimes get better results depending on what you’re looking for.

Most people know the basic syntax like using quotations around a phrase to find that exact phrase. If you want to find every instance of the word – social media – then you want to type “social media” into Google. Without the quotes it will show you every instance of the word “social” and the word “media” as well as “social media”.

That’s an easy one you probably already knew, but there is much more advanced syntax you can use as well.

PC Tips Box has a very good article about Google search syntax that covers the basics and the advanced.

What Factors Influence Video Rankings On Google Search?

Chris Jones — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:55:09 +0000

Google’s Matt Cutts was recently asked what factors influence video rankings on Google search? Here’s what he had to say:

SEO Tips From Google’s Matt Cutts

Chris J. — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:43:44 +0000

One thing the Internet certainly has no shortage of is advice about SEO. Bloggers in particular often times swear by certain SEO strategies which may or may not have any real value, but simply seem like they do. However, one source of advice on SEO is prized above all others. This source is prized because it holds the keys to the castle so to speak. SEO guys spend their time trying to figure out how to legally manipulate this source to get it to do what they want. The source I’m referring to is of course Google. When Google gives advice about how to get better search rankings on their search engine — you should do what they say.

Google’s oracle of all things SEO is a guy named Matt Cutts. He’s an engineer at Google and head of their webspam team. He wrote the original SafeSearch program for Google to protect kids from adult material. The bottom line is that Matt knows what the hell he’s talking about when it comes to Google and how to get better rankings.

Take a look at the following video. Matt Cutts talks in great detail about how to achieve better search rankings with your WordPress blog. This from the 2007 WordCamp in San Francisco, and even though it’s a couple years old the tips he gives remain just as true today.

Don’t Put Your Blog Title On The End Of Post Titles

Chris Jones — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:48:32 +0000

You know all those blog experts who tell you that adding your blog title to the end of post titles is good SEO? Guess what? It’s not.

I had been noticing for some time that my posts weren’t showing up in search results very well like they once did. It seemed like traffic was slowly decreasing so I decided to do a little experiment. I surfed around the web looking at some of the top blogs in a variety of fields like technology, politics, news, business, etc. I noticed the one thing most had in common (other than great content) was their post titles.

The vast majority of them used this format…

%post_title%

Here’s the format I was using…

%post_title% | %blog_title%

So I decided it was time for a change. I went under my All-In-One SEO settings and changed my post titles.

Its been nearly two weeks and I can tell you that my search engine traffic has more than doubled. Each post seems to get a far better search engine ranking when the post title is all by itself. I think Google in particular liked the blog titles attached a couple of years ago, but it really seems like that’s no longer the case.

Google SearchWiki: What It Means For You

Chris Jones — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:44:04 +0000

Andy has a great post over at Marketing Pilgrim that looks at how you can use Google SearchWiki to your advantage.

Video: Keyword Tracking

Chris Jones — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:38:01 +0000

Here is an excellent video that explains what ‘Keyword Tracking’ is and why it’s important:

Video: Interview With A Google Guru

Chris Jones — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:24:08 +0000

Here’s an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts. This guy is insanely influential in SEO circles, because of his position at Google. When Matt speaks — you should listen.

Video: Link Building

Chris Jones — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:19:04 +0000

Here’s an excellent video about link building…

Video: The Importance Of Quality Content

Chris Jones — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:48:27 +0000

Here is an interview with ClickZ editor Rebecca Lieb about the importance of quality content on your website:

(hat tip WMT)

Google Now Indexing Scanned Documents

Chris Jones — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:45:59 +0000

Google will now be indexing scanned documents — takeover of world almost complete.

From the Google Blog:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

As Andy Beal points out, the possibilities for this really are endless.