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Google SEO Shortcuts – Simple, Fast & Reliable!

Picture of Honcho Honcho : Jan 31, 2011 12:11:49 PM

This blog is essentially a definitive guide to my favourite Google shortcuts. Google shortcuts can provide you with free, fast and accurate facts about your website and your competitor’s websites. These quick analytical tools simply require you to type the shortcut into the standard Google search bar, no downloads, no hassle just fast and reliable information direct from Google!

My favourite shortcuts are listed below with examples as to how I get the most out of them. • site:www.ithinkmedia.co.uk This will show you all of the pages that are indexed by Google on the URL that you have specified. This can be helpful when looking to see if a page on your site has been indexed and can also be used to easily compare the size of two or more websites. This shortcut can be extended by searching indexed pages for a keyword or certain page, this is an example of how you would search iThinkMedia for all blog pages. site:www.ithinkmedia.co.uk “blog” Keep in mind that this is all case sensitive! So make sure that it is all the same as shown above. • link:www.bbc.co.uk This shortcut will show you all of the indexed links to your selected URL. This is good for finding how many links you have pointing to the site and where those links are coming from. To search the links you can add quotation marks and type a keyword. You can also find links to particular pages on your website by extending the url to contain the targeted page, an example of this is as follows link:www.bbc.co.uk/news/. • info:www.ithinkmedia.co.uk info: is a index that shows you the different bits of information that Google can tell you, these include things like cache date, links to and links from. Basically if you ever forget what shortcut you need or forget what to type then use info: to discover what you need to use. • related:www.mothercare.co.uk Related is a good tool for discovering competitors for a potential new client or your own business. This tool can be used to quickly look through a list of websites that Google has identified as competitors encase you have overlooked any. • cache:www.ithinkmedia.co.uk A cashed webpage is a snapshot of each page examined as Google crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. When typing “cache:” followed by the website in question you will be automatically redirected to the cached version of the site with an info bar at the top that tells you what date the page was cashed at. • filetype:pdf “www.ithinkmedia.co.uk” To find a select type of file that you are looking for then you can search Google by using the shortcut filetype: this can help you to locate a number of different file types on your site as shown in the example above. To specify what file you want to look for just type the file name after the colon and specify a website in quotation marks. • allintitle: seo ithinkmedia The allintitle: shortcut will show you all results with a specified key term in the title tag. The example above will show you all the pages with title tags that have the keywords seo and iThinkMedia in them. This can be useful when searching for related pages or identifying if your websites title tags are optimised correctly. • inurl:ithinkmedia To discover all pages with a select keyword within there url then you can use the inurl: shortcut. This will allow you to find all pages with your brand name in the url or find pages with a topic that you are looking for. • site:.co.uk “ithinkmedia” site:.co.uk will give you only results that are on a .co.uk domain name. This can be extended by using speech marks to specify a keyword that you would like to target. For example if your company has two sites, .co.uk and .com then you could get results for one without the other. These quick seo shortcuts could save you allot of time and provide you with quick and accurate data. What are your favourite shortcuts? How often do you use them? Leave a comment bellow with your opinion! Make sure you check out some of our other blog posts like SEO Exhibitions and Google Chrome Extensions