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08.19.09 Using SEO Commands To Achieve Higher Ranking  By Patrick Hare One of the ways to keep track of how Google is viewing your site is to use some of the more esoteric commands available to searchers. These commands make it possible to filter information in the Google index, and get a picture of how Google considers the relationship between your backlinks, metatags, and on-page content. One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is to use these universally-available commands to diagnose common problems. Here are some commands and ways we use them to check site issues: • Site: This command shows all the pages that Google has found for your site. It should always be followed by your website in the format of site:example.com. If you have a lot of subdomains and only want to see the main site, you might try site:www.example.com. This command can be combined with other keywords, which lets you find specific pages, so the format "site:www.example.com dry dog food" would show you all pages on example.com about dry dog food. This tool is especially useful if you are trying to discover keyword blurring (or cannibalization) issues, because you can check to see if a single site is referencing the same topic on multiple pages. • Allinanchor: Ostensibly, the function of this command is to tell you which sites are getting specific anchor texts (which are linked keywords) from other sites and web pages. For instance, if you search on "allinanchor:running shoes" you should be seeing a Google's preferred order of sites that are getting links for that term. In the world of Google, rankings are heavily weighted on link popularity, and in most cases your site's result for a given keyword should appear in the vicinity of the allinanchor ranking. If you are significantly below your allinanchor, your site's architecture or content may not be matching up with its links. If you are significantly ahead of your allinanchor score, then you may be up against competitors who don't do a good job with SEO. • Allintitle: This command tells you how many pages online have a particular set of words in their titles. This can be useful for seeing how other site titles are configured. Since the title of a webpage is the primary way of defining page content, you can find relevant topics more easily with allintitle. A great way to combine two functions, and sniff out keyword blurring, is to use this in conjunction with the site: command so you would type in "allintitle:dog food bowls site:example.com" so you can see how many pages on the site have titles about the same topic. Excessive title repetition can drag down search engine rankings, so this is one way to get a quick list of the pages you should modify.
• Allintext: Want to find pages which mention a topic in their body text? This command ignores other considerations like anchors and titles and goes to the on-page content. Once again, too many similar pages can water down the focus on an important page. When in doubt, focus your energies on the page that gets the best allinanchor score, or has the most topical links pointing at it. • Allinurl: This command searches out URLs (or domain names) which contain a certain word or phrase. Search engines give some preference to domain names that contain keyword matches. You could use this command to find sites that you may want to buy. You can also see if other sites are adding descriptive phrases to their own URL structures, so you might see example.com/dog-food-bowls/red.html. Once again, this is a good way to check your own site structure for duplicates, especially if you have a site with thousands of pages. • Cache: If you don't know whether or not your site is cached, and you don't have the Google toolbar, you can simply type in cache: followed by your website. You can even do this for specific pages. The advantage of this command is that Google will tell you the last time it cached your page, assuming that it has been cached. To see what Google has read on the page, click the link that says "Cached Text" and you can see what words on your site that Google has found. As always, it may take a few days for Google to apply cached text to its index, so your result in the Google index may show an older title or description. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group. |
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