7 Web
Search Tips for Online Business Owners
Most online business owners are conducting
fairly regular web searches. Typically the kind of information that
they're seeking include local and national competitors, keyword
research, and searches for resources for a particular topic. I recently
tried to find a simple tutorial to help my clients conduct better
Internet searches. Unfortunately, many of the tutorials that I found
were created by academic libraries and provided too much detail and too
many options for the simpler kinds of searches that most of us do.
Below are some simple tips to make your online search more effective.
Since I do the majority of my searches on Google, some of these tips are
Google-specific:
1. Carefully select your search terms. Instead of using broad
or general terms that will return thousands of possible sites, try to
use terms that are very specific to your topic. One way to narrow your
terms is to review relevant sites you've already discovered and identify
search terms from those sites.
2. Use quotation marks. If you're seeking a specific phrase,
like "Internet marketing coach", enclose the term in quotation marks.
Called a forced phrase search, this tells the search engine to return
only entries that contain these words in this order. Sometimes searches
without the quotes return similar entries, but you could also get an
unrelated entry like, "...Internet that makes it easier on
marketing for the athletic coach..."
3. Use Boolean operators. Boolean operators are words that
allow you to combine search terms in most search engines. The most
commonly used ones are:
AND - AND tells the search engine to find both terms on the same
site. For instance, entering "business AND ethics" would instruct the
search engine to find web pages that contain both terms, "business" and
"ethics." You can also use the '"+" sign for this, as in "business" +
"ethics"
OR - OR tells the search engine to find one term or the other.
Entering "business OR ethics" would cause the search engine to look for
web pages that contain either the word "business" or the word "ethics,"
but not necessarily both words. If you use this combination, be
prepared for the search engine to return thousands of sites.
NOT - NOT tells the search engine to find pages that contain the
first word but not the second. This instruction is helpful when you
know your search term is likely to appear with another term that does
not interest you, like "golf NOT cart". You can also use the "-" sign
for this, as in "golf -cart".
4. Site search. This helps you search for a phrase on a
particular site. The command for this is site:URL "keyphrase".
So, if you wanted to search the Houston Chronicle for mentions of Anna
Nicole Smith, you would enter the following: site:chron.com "Anna
Nicole Smith".
5. Search within a URL. Many times as you're thinking about
buying a domain name, you want to find who may be using a particular
term as a part of their domain name. Use the inURL code for this. For
example, if you wanted to find all the URLs that contained the word
"career" in Google, you would enter the following: inurl:career
6. Use a metasearch engine. Instead of trying to search
various search engines separately, use a meta search engine. My
favorite is Dogpile.com, which
searches Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
7. Give yourself a time limit. I've started searches and have
had hours disappear in what seems to be minutes. Set up a timer to
notify you 15 minutes into your search. You can then determine if you
are wasting your time on a particular search strategy, spending too much
time or a site, or assess if you need to refocus the search.
About.com provides a full Google Cheat Sheet with more detailed search
queries on their site:
http://websearch.about.com/library/cheatsheet/blgooglecheatsheet.htm
Web research doesn't have to be a time-consuming task. You can find
exactly the information you seek by using a few simple shortcuts to get
the best results.
(c) 2009 Donna Gunter
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Online Business Coach
Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online retirement businesses
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