5 Google commands to know for SEO

Google is the most used search engine. As marketing manager you need to know that Google offers additional information that is sometimes ignored and available through special commands.

By typing advanced commands in the search engine, you can filter the results and get more precise answers on a keyword, or simply check your website indexation. These commands are important in helping you improve your ranking.

Nowadays, everyone is capable to make a search based on « keywords » in Google. Although these classic searches may enable you to find interesting results, it is also necessary to know special commands to be able to question the search engine better and that these could help you to improve your SEO.

Here is a list of 5 essential commands for Google.

1 – The « site: » command

The Google « site: » command shows the list of pages known of the domain indicated . It will allow the indexation of a website or a part of website to be studied. It gives an approximation of the number of pages known in the search engine.

For example, the request (site:myposeo.com) lists indexed pages of the myposeo.com website. This command can be useful during the website creation to track indexation.

Note: the first result that appear in the search engine relates to the Google Search Console. Having a Google Search Console account allows you to analyse ranking in Google and get some information to improve SEO. A little advertising for Google tools!

2 – The « allintitle: » command

The « allintitle » command allows to get all the pages containing the keyword in the title tag. The research is only done on the pages titles. In the example below, the command sends back all the web pages with the world « myposeo » in the title tag, i.e. 1060 pages.

3 – The « allinurl: » command

This command lets you restrict the search to the URL of HTML pages. allinurl:myposeo sends back all pages having the keyword « myposeo » in the URL.

4 – Insert quotation larks « « 

Quotation marks allow to make a search on the exact terms making up the request. Only pages carrying the expression (in the order) will come up between quotation marks.

This command can also detect duplicate content. By inserting a complet sentence in quotation marks, the websites that have already used the same sentence will be displayed. This command also allows you to find websites related to your domain and, therefore, often competitors.

5 – Insert the minus sign –

This command remove a term or a domain of the search. For example, the request : « voyage train -avion -voiture » displays the results with the words « voyage » and « train » but excludes all the pages mentioning about « avion » and « voiture ».

Note : – is preceded by a space otherwise the words are connected.

Google search engine is flexible because it provides many other commands that will allow you to refine searches and get a large amount of information about a website or its competitors. With the results obtained, webmasters can find good sources for netlinking to improve their websites’ ranking, for example.

So, now you need to analyse the search engine in every corner your website!