One of the first things to do when optimising your website for your chosen keywords that you have researched thoroughly, is to analyse how competitive the competition is for those keywords.
By using these commands, you can gauge how hard you are going to have to work, in order to obtain good SERP´s ranking on all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. All of the commands can be used at Google but only a few can be used on Yahoo. None can be used with MSN at this time. Seeing as Google has around 60% of search traffic, its an ideal place to do your keyword research and should give you a very good idea of the kind of competition you are up against across all of the engines.
The first two we are going to look at are intitle and allintitle. Its a fact that one of the most important on site optimisations is that of the title tag. By placing your keywords in your title you are seen by google to be placing heavey emphasis on these keywords. It´s also a fact that if you do not have much competition on a certain keyword and you place this within your title tag, this is enough to get you on the 1st page of google when doing a query for said keywords. So, one of the first logical things to do when analysing the keyword competition is to do an intitle and allintitle search.
As can be seen by the results returned by Google above, there are 1,710,000 web site pages that have either “holiday” or “rentals” mentioned within their title tags.You also may want to note something else about these returned results which is rather important. You can see that within some of the results the chosen keywords “holiday” or “rentals” has also been highlighted within the url paths of the page which is another indication from Google that shows that using your chosen keywords within your urls on your site can only help with ranking for those keywords.Ok, so say we want to check for web pages that have both “holiday” and “rentals” in the title? You guessed it, we can use the allintitle command. Which takes the form
allintitle:holiday rentalsIf you take a look at the next image you will see that there are fewer results returned by Google for this query which I think is expected as our search string has gone from one word to two which means our query is becoming a bit more focused and specific.
And as expected, there are fewer results as our search is more specific.There are a few other commands that can also be used in the same way on both Google and Yahoo. They are,
inurl, allinurl, inanchor and allinanchor. For example “inurl:floyd” will return all web pages that have the word “floyd” within the url. Or “inurl:pink”, will return all pages that have the word “pink” in the url. If you want to search for more than one word in the url or indeed title or anchor try the following, “allinurl:pink floyd” which is the same as doing “inurl:pink inurl:floyd” in the same search.
So you can see. Within the Google command set you have many tools in order to help you analyse and figure out which keywords are going to give you the biggest headache. Also, you will want to make sure that optimising for those specific keywords/phrases is going to be worthwhile. So make sure that you do your research to find out how many searches are performed on those keywords. Thats another blog post altogether.Maybe the next one?Until next time..
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