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Think about your Keywords

You’ll notice in the heading I used keywords, not keyword. The problem with using one keyword is your term might have several meanings, which increases the number of results. For example, if I type the term expedition, Google displays content about trips and cars. At the top of the search engine results page (SERP), Google shows how many pages are indexed with your term. In this example, there are over 12 million pages (1).

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* The green checkmark icons that show to the right of listings are NOT a Google feature. I’m using the McAfee Site Advisor toolbar and it adds these icons to alert users of problem sites.

You can also see the page is broken into several areas. The red boxed areas (2) and (3) represent results from ad campaigns. These are sponsored links and are paid placements. These ads display based on your search terms and geo-targeting. The system determined from my IP address that I’m in Northern California, which is one reason I see the 2007 Ford Expedition ad near the top. Reviewing the page, you can see more advertisers display for the car term rather than the trip term.

In contrast, the organic results (4) favor the trip version as it returned results for well-known adventure travel firms. These results are known as organic search results and companies such as Lindblad Expeditions, National Geographic Expeditions or Geographic Expeditions did not pay Google to appear. Although we may think of Google as having indexed all web pages on the Internet, they have not. There are many cases where web pages will not display on your results in a search engine. As example, the webmaster may request the page not be indexed or the site is too new.

Adding Keywords

Unless you’re searching for a unique word like blimperskins, you’ll find there are too many results to be of value for single keyword searches. Seldom will your answer be on the top page so you need to filter the list. You can do this by adding keywords. You might do this by inclusion or exclusion. For example, I could type:

expedition –car

The – sign instructs Google to remove results for the term that follows. Google would find all pages with the term expedition and then remove any results that mentioned car.

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You can see we no longer have sponsored listings and the count of indexed pages dropped to 2,690,000.

Putting Quotes around Keywords

These results are still too broad so rather than excluding cars; we should add keywords that better defines our intent. Let’s try:

expeditions dog sledding

Google will look for pages with all the terms. You might think of this query as all pages showing expeditions and dog and sledding. Now, we’re getting a bit closer as the number of indexed pages containing our terms dropped to 407,000.

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Google, like most search engines bolds your keywords wherever they appear. To make it easier to see, I’ve highlighted their bolded terms in the above screen snap. You’ll notice that you see terms like sled dog in bold. This is because I haven’t used any restriction that tells Google not to use portions of words or worry about the word order. This means there could be several words in between my search terms and the word order doesn’t matter.

One way to refine your search is to place quote marks around terms that you want to appear as a phrase. I’ll revise our query to:

expeditions “dog sledding”

Google would return pages with the terms expeditions and the phrase dog sledding. This should remove results with sled dog and other less relevant entries.

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Using quotes around the phrase cut the indexed page count to 136,000. Glancing through the pages, you realize you prefer not to travel to Canada, Mongolia or Alaska. What we really want is to travel to some place in Scandinavia.

expeditions “dog sledding” scandinavia

Adding Scandinavia to our query brings the number of pages to 678. As you add terms to your search, the number of indexed pages drops. Still a lot of pages, but we can see the entries are more aligned to travel adventures.

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Reviewing the Search Results and Cached Page

When you review the results, you’ll notice the two-line description that appears under the link varies. Some references seem to have text that is cobbled together. In a sense that is true, but Google provides clues. If you look at the screen capture above for label (1) you’ll see in the boxed area two lines ending in ellipses. These three dots show that Google truncated content. If you see multiples ellipses in these two lines, it means Google pulled text lines from the web page to provide this snippet.

These descriptions sometimes make it difficult to understand the page’s content. Some webmasters, like me, prefer to write own descriptions. These descriptions are more apt to show if your search query closely matches the article. If your query is not as relevant, you're likely to see a Google produced abstract with your query terms embedded. The amount of text displayed varies between search engines, but Google will show about 160 characters.

Below the snippet, you usually have two more links. One is to view the cached page and the other is view related or similar pages. The cached page is how the page looked when Google indexed it. Google continually indexes the web, but that doesn’t mean it reindexes every page daily. Depending on the site, there could be long gaps between when a page is reindexed. This means that clicking the page title and clicking the Cached link can result in different content.

Even though the cached page may be older, it offers some nice features. At the top of the cached page, you can see when Google indexed the page (1). This page can still show even if the original page has been removed from the site. For example, if you click the link and get a 404 Page not found error, you can still view the cached version. Another benefit is the cached page highlights your keywords (2), which make it easier to find your terms on the page.

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Finding Synonyms & Thinking of Word Variations

Sometimes you need to do a search, but you’re not certain of the keywords to use. What if you miss an important term or you don’t want to run through various permutations? Although you could use the OR operator and list several terms, another solution is to use Google’s synonym operator. All you need to do is to put a tilde before your term such as:

travel ~inexpensive

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Since Google bolds your keywords, you can find what terms Google uses for synonyms. In this case, we can see "cheap", "inexpensive" and "low cost".

The last point to stress is everyone thinks differently. The vocabulary you use may not be the same one found on a web page. Sometimes there is a disconnect between you and the page author. Other times, it may be an issue in how they use their words. As example, they may use the phrase “dog sledding” instead of dogsledding. Even slight nuances like these can change your results. If at first you don’t find what you need, try using some of these search tips. Although the items mention refers to Google, they can be adapted to most search engines.

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