Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

Google advance search operators are useful search queries that can help you determine your competitive environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign requires. Here are the Google search operators most commonly used by SEOs:

1. site:

Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google.

If you find a large discrepancy (> 20%) between the number of web pages indexed and the number of pages you have published, you will need to identify and resolve the technical issues that may be blocking web crawlers.

2. allinurl

For a quick way to see if a specific page is indexed, you can use the allinurl:www.webpage.com query. Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no results if it isn’t.

3. link:

Link:www.webpage.com will display all sites linking to this particular webpage. Since link popularity is an important search engine ranking factor, it’s important to determine how many links you have, and how many you need. You should definitely use this search query on your competitors.

It’s important to note that Google link operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for its lack of accuracy. Many SEOs use Yahoo Site Explorer for more accurate link analysis.

4. allinanchor:

Allinanchor:keyword returns all the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific keywords in link anchor text.

5 allintitle:

Allintitle:keyword returns a list of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.

6. allintext:

Allintext:keyword tells Google to display webpages that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.

It tends to give prominence to documents that contain the keyword at the beginning of the body text.

7. cache:

Cache:www.webpage.com will show you the last time the Google crawled your web page and what version of the page it has in its cache.

Cache:www.webpage.com keyword will show you the keyword or key phrases highlighted within the cached content.

8. info:

Info:www.webpage.com shows a variety of data about that web page, such as the latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link to your site, web pages within your site and web pages containing the your domain name.

You can use Google advanced search operators them to keep track of your SEO efforts and keep an eye on your competition. However, understand that the data these operators really just provide a ball-park estimation.

According to Michael Martinez, using Google’s advanced search query operators has its pros and cons:
From www.seo-theory.com:

Search engine results analysis has to focus on the most important factors for optimization. You need to know:

1. Which pages in your site are indexed
2. How often your page data is recached
3. How many of your pages pass value through their links
4. How many of your pages are receiving value from other pages

In some cases you can (and should) combine query operators to refine your analysis. If rank-checks and backlink profiles are all you’re doing, you’re running slower than the leaders in the field and they are way out ahead of you. You can’t understand a Web site’s performance simply by looking at a handful of targeted queries and running backlink reports on Yahoo!

The search engines look at hundreds of signals to determine how to crawl, index, and rank sites. You should be looking at hundreds of signals, too.

What’s Code Got to Do With It?

Face it, while linklove is sexy, in SEO, code ain’t no second hand emotion.

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, where keyword research, SEO copy-writing, linkbuilding, and code optimization work as a team in an attempt to address a variety of search engine ranking factors. Programming your website in a way that allows engine spiders to access, categorize, and index the content on your site so will ensure your other SEO tactics go the full mile. As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

W3C Compliance and SEO

There is a great deal of debate as to whether W3C compliancy will enhance search engine rankings. According to Michael Gray:
From www.wolf-howl.com:

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Even if you can’t enforce strict compliance, be familiar with Google Webmaster guidelines and search engine bot indexing behavior, and code your site accordingly.

Understanding Semantic XHTML Markup

Semantic markup (or Semantic coding) is the art of programming your website so that the code used is descriptive and representative of the information it contains…and more meaningful to search engine bots. Standardized markup tags define the content on a page better than generic elements like <div> or <span> tags.

For example, if you were creating a page heading, use this code:

<h1>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup</h1>

Instead of this code:

<div id=”page-title”>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup </div>

Semantic Coding Guidelines

Here are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry Wise:

• <h1> tags should only be used once on a page, to define the title and/or purpose of the page. It should be very close in meaning to the <title> tag of your page.
• <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> header tags should be used for subheadings, in order of descending importance. Try not to skip.
• Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.
• For bold or emphasized text, use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags.
• Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

List of Semantic Code Elements

• ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.
• CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.
• CODE: Computer or Programming code.
• DEL: Deleted word or phrase.
• DFN: Definition.
• DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.
• EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.
• INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.
• KBD: Keyboard instructions.
• OL: Ordered List.
• SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.
• STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.
• UL: Unordered List.
• VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme fails a simple test for truly semantic XHTML markup. One of the most common errors is that the blog title / logo is served within <H1> tags. Serving your post titles in <h1> tags is far better.

For a great info on how to correct your blog XHTML, visit master WordPress developer Cris Pearson’s blog post The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs.
For non-code related tactics on blogging SEO, check out my summary of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO meetup, hosted by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Freedom from Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when the amount of code on a page greatly exceeds the amount of text on the page. Excessive code can get in the way of search engine spiders indexing your content, especially if your content is placed deep within your code structure. It’s harder for search engine spiders to crawl the content of the page and determine its relevancy of the page if there’s extraneous code in the way. Furthermore, code bloat can create longer than normal download time, which can impact how search engines rank your site, and cause visitors to navigate away from your webpage.

There are four types of code bloat to be aware of:

• On-page styling
• On-page JavaScripts
• Excessive table usage
• Poor HTML formatting

According to technical SEO consultants HiRank, you can reduce code bloat by moving as much javascript and CSS to external files. This enables your users to cache those files on first load, that way, search engines don’t have to download these files all the time. To fix these four common types of code bloat, visit Stoney deGeyter’s post on how to fix the Javascript and CSS that is jacking up your SEO.

Good web development involves minimizing code bloat and programming your website with a low code to text ratio in mind. While there is no agreement on an ideal code to text ratio, the lower the ratio, the faster the load time, and the easier for search engine spiders to determine the relevancy of your content.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, blogging, blog seo, xhtml, semantic markup, code to text, w3c compliance, code bloat