SEO Search Tricks Using Google

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Here are some SEO Search Tricks using the Google Search bar that you may not know about to help you analyze a website for SEO.

link: Website URL
intitle:Keyword site:Website URL
site:Website URL Keyword
allintitle:Keyword1 Keyword2…
inurl:Keyword1 Keyword2...
“Keyword1 Keyword2”

SEO Search Tricks

link: Website URL Provides a quick list of sites that link to the website’s URL. The search will certainly not bring up all backlinks, but it is a quick way to check to see who is actually linking to the website and also give an estimate of how many of your website pages are indexed.

In this example I was looking for any reference to MellowJohnnys.com

site:Website URL Keyword will return results where the Keyword is on the page, in the title or anchor text.

If you want to get a bit more granular you can look at just a website’s URL for any page, title or anchor text where a specific keyword was used. As you can see the results went from 15,400 results in the previous example to 606 results in the example below.

intitle:Keyword site:Website URL will return results from a given website where the keyword is in the title.

In this example I was looking for the term bike in a title “intitle:bike site:mellowjohnnys.com”, which is even more granular than the previous example. As a result only 226 results were returned.

As you can see, depending on how you search and what method you use, you can break down the results into smaller chunks of URLs.

allintitle:Keyword1 Keyword2… will return results where the Keyword1 and Keyword2.. are in the title.

inurl:Keyword1 Keyword2... will return results where the Keyword1 or Keyword2.. are in the url.

allinurl:Keyword1 Keyword2... will return results where all the Keywords are in the url.

“Keyword1 Keyword2” finds an exact match where the Keywords are in the title, anchor text or on the page.

Google Suggest

Google suggest displays whenever you start typing something in a Google Search text box. The Google suggestions are based on Google’s algorithm of commonly searched words or phrases. When people are doing keyword research, it is a fantastic idea to see what Google Suggest is showing.

In this example I typed Pugs and Google suggested a list of phrases people are commonly looking for. Notice it’s a blend of both localized searches and national/global searches.

Obviously Google is smart enough to know I live in Austin, Texas, so it shows a few Austin, Texas results.

Next if I type “Pugs A”, it will show me the results of searches that contain “Pugs” and words that start with “A”

Obviously I could continue typing in “Pugs” and each letter of the alphabet to get other results and ideas for keyword research.

The problem with Google Suggest is to record all the keywords and go through all the permutations can be quite time consuming.

Answer The Public

An easier solution is to use a free website program called Answer The Public.

What is super cool about Answer The Public is it loads all the Google Suggests in a downloadable format. It also includes question phrases including Why, When, Who, What…, it includes prepositions phrases using like, near, to…