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Following my last post about Google’s advanced operators and how they can be used to refine your search to be more specific I will move onto a few other useful operators.

cache:
The cache operator is fairly useful as it shows us what Google saw on its last crawl of a given site. This is extremely useful if you have a dynamic site or your rankings have changed for some unknown reason. You can check if Google tried to crawl your site while it was down or had scripting error issues at the time.

link:
The link operator is another of the more useful of the bunch. This tells us the location of links pointing to a site which Google recognises. It is worth noting that this operator is not hugely accurate and can miss links but is useful as a quick search.

related:
The related operator is fairly useful and can be a bit of fun too. It will give you a list of sites which are related to the given URL. For example, if you use the related operator with google.com (related:google.com) you will find a list of rival search engines and directories. So if you want to shop around it is a pretty cool search toy.

Google has even built an operator which can make using these even easier. If we use the info operator (info:www.somesite.com) this will return quick links to each of the mentioned operators along with the site: operator.

Unlike the previous operators mentioned, these ones tend not to merge too well together and are used best by themselves.

Adrian Mursec – SEO Programmer

The information held in the meta tags of a site are crucial for SEO as it carries a lot of weight with search engines. I have written a guide of some of the most common meta tags:

Title: This is the title of the page you are writing. Try and keep each page’s title unique and relevant to the content of the page as search engines apply a lot of weight to this tag.

Keywords: This is barely used at all with Google any more. It was filled with a huge number of keywords in attempts to get rankings with search engines and thus was given less and less weight. We are now at the stage where Google doesn’t really use this tag any more. Other, less advanced search engines still use this tag.

Description: The most obvious reason for the description meta tag is to tell search engines what to put in the short paragraph after a result. It holds a lot of weight with Google, so you should carefully choose what you put here.

Robots: This is one of the key meta tags to watch out for when optimising a site. It basically allows a ‘per page’ control over what robots do with a site. So you can tell a robot it can traverse the page, but not cache it, or deny a robot any access at all.

Distribution: Set this to global to let some more specialised search engines know that the page is orientated towards a global audience.

Rating: Set this to ’safe for kids’ if your site contains material that is safe for children to view. It’s not really used by many search engines, simply because it is often abused and easy to mislead people.

Copyright: This is more of a protection for the owner of the site. It is used to define copyright owners. Be warned though, filling in this tag will not protect you from other sites copying your content.

Expires: This tag sets a time and a date when the site can be considered to have expired. This tag is not really used by many of the major search engines, but many less advanced search engines do still use it. Set it to ‘never’ to make sure older search engines keep coming back.

Refresh: This tag tells the browser to refresh the page or load a new page after a certain amount of time. You should use this tag with extreme care. Search engines often consider this a very spammy method to redirect and refresh pages.

Language: It is only really worth filling in this one if your site is not written in English. It can help categorise non English sites into the correct language.

There are of course, many more meta tags that can be included, many have little to no use, often having been deprecated by modern browsers.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer