Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tips and Tricks
Search Engine Tip 1 - Search Title
- title:
AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Inktomi - intitle: Restricts the results to documents containing a particular word in its title.
[intitle: google search] will return documents that mention the word "google" in their title, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (title or no).
Google, Teoma - allintitle: Restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title.
[allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the title.
Google
Search Engine Tip 2 - Search Site
- host:
AltaVista - site: restrict the results to those websites in the given domain.
[help site:www.google.com] will find pages about help within www.google.com.
Excite, Google (Netscape, Yahoo) - url.host:
AllTheWeb,Lycos (for AllTheWeb results only) - intext: Searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth.
- domain:
Inktomi (HotBot, iWon, LookSmart) - Daterange:(start dateend date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Uses Julian dates
- Filetype: search documents of type
- none
AOL, Direct Hit, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Northern Light, Open Directory, Yahoo
Search Engine Tip 3 - Search URL
- url:
AltaVista, Excite, Northern Light - url.all:
AllTheWeb, Lycos (for AllTheWeb results only) - allinurl / inurl: Restrict the results to documents containing that word(s) in the url
[allinurl: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the url.
Google - originurl:
Inktomi (AOL, GoTo, HotBot) - u:
Yahoo - none
AOL, Direct Hit, HotBot, LookSmart, MSN, Open Directory
Search Engine Tip 4 - Search Link
- link: List web pages that have links to the specified webpage
[link:www.octopusjuice.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the OctopusJuice.com homepage.
AltaVista, Google, Northern Light - linkdomain:
Inktomi (AOL, HotBot, iWon, MSN)(NOTE: measures links to entire domains) - link.all:
AllTheWeb,Lycos (for AllTheWeb results only) - none
AOL, Direct Hit, Excite, HotBot, LookSmart, Northern Light, Netscape, Yahoo (N/A)
Search Engine Tip 5 - Search Anchor
- anchor:
AltaVista - none
AllTheWeb, AOL Search, Direct Hit, Excite, Google, Inktomi, HotBot, Lycos


