Dexterity Unlimited - Simple, Standards-based, Semantic » 2007 » September

For several years I have been of the opinion that the majority of people using Google’s search engine do not really know how to use but a small fraction of its potential when looking for something online. Wading through server logs and Google Analytics reports has only reinforced this opinion.

I suppose that this article is not the type to reach the general searching public, but I find that even people who have been online for years, and who work in Internet related fields are unaware of some of the basic functions they can use to get better results from their searches.

I would like to give people a couple basic tips that should help them to narrow their searches in order to find web pages that contain what they are really trying to find.

Use Quotes

When most people search using Google, they type a few words into the search box, and press the button, hoping for the best. While this can yield results containing useful pages, often these results contain countless pages that have nothing to do with what you really want to find.

Consider looking for ‘search engine optimization’. If you put that text into the search box by themselves and click the search button, you are asking Google to give you a list of any pages that contain all of these three words. Somewhere in that list might be a page discussing a search for ways to optimize the output thrust of a jet engine. Is that what you had in mind? It does contain all of the search terms.

Placing quotation marks (”) around words that constitute phrases you are looking for will greatly improve the relevancy of the results returned by Google. In some cases, this is a necessity when searching for some words, particularly names, that contain spaces or hyphens. While doing genealogy research online, I must use quotes around the family name Te Kulve in order to get desired results.

Plus and Minus Signs

Using a plus (+) or minus (-) sign immediately before a word or a quoted phrase in your search query will require Google to be certain that pages containing that word or phrase are included or excluded from the results.

Have you ever initiated a search only to find that hundreds of pages containing your search terms, but obviously unrelated to what you want to find, are included in the results? One way to get those pages out of the results is to find another term that most of them have in common that you can exclude with a refined query.

If hundreds of pages about baseball show up in your search for a quantum mechanics reference, simply add -baseball to your search query. The same technique works with other advanced search options. Are you getting hundreds of unrelated results from a particular site? Use -site:www.domain.com to exclude pages within that site from the search results.

Do some of the results in the list not contain one of the words you are searching for? Use the plus sign in front of that word to require that the results all contain that word. I frequently use a plus sign in front of each word or phrase in my search queries. Yes, it’s overkill, and most times not necessary, but old habits die hard.

What does this mean for SEO?

For those of us involved in Search Engine Optimization, it can only benefit us if people learn how to search more effectively. It’s usually easier to get nearer the top of a list of fifteen thousand results than a list of seventeen million results.

It also means that we need to keep our eyes open to what people are searching for when they come to our sites via Google (or any other search engine). Look at your log file reports, or Google Analytics reports. See how people find you. Are their searches really looking for something different, or are you hitting the right targets?

Help your friends and neighbors find what they’re looking for. Give them a couple basic tips about searching, and I’m sure they’ll see better results. They’ll thank you for it.

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Do you make web sites? Do you know (X)HTML? I had to ask this question after spending the past few hours wading through some code that I did not create. That’s probably the most infuriating and time-consuming thing that any web developer ever does.

I’ve never used Dreamweaver, and I doubt that I ever will. For one thing, I don’t think they make a version that will run on Linux, but that’s beside the point. I suppose that in the hands of someone who truly knows what they’re doing, Dreamweaver can spit out some nice code. Unfortunately, I don’t think most people know what they’re doing.

Have you ever seen six sets of nested font tags, all containing the same information? I saw exactly that tonight. Obviously, the creator of these files did not know much (if anything) about the code that underlies the pages that so many of us traverse day after day. Was it the operator’s fault, or the software’s? How on earth can a program actually interpret code like that as a proper thing to write to a file?

I hope that this was code from an older version of Dreamweaver. I really do hope that’s the case, and that the more recent versions can tell the difference between necessary code and reams of fat that should be cut. The nested tables and cells containing only non-breaking spaces were bad enough, but so much of the code was simply garbage that did nothing but eat up bandwidth.

Please, I implore you; if you want to make web sites in any capacity, learn (X)HTML. I don’t care if you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, but make sure you can look at the resulting code afterward and know what it does. Make sure you know what mistakes the software has made so that you can correct them. If you do, in the end you will save time, you will save storage space, you will save bandwidth, etc. Those things add up to money in several ways, and who doesn’t like to save a buck or two?

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