by Marco Angioni II

Created on: August 07, 2010

Advanced operators are limitations that a search engine user places on the search engine.  Some common examples of advanced operators are “site:” (which limit search engine results to a particular website), “inurl:” (which limits search engines to webpages that contain the search terms in the URL of the webpage), and “intext:” (which limits search engine results to webpages which contain the search terms in the text of the webpage only, and excluding webpage title, URLs, and met tags).

As you can tell, the purpose of advanced operators is to severely limit the number of results a search engine produces.  Although advanced operators limit the amount of results produced, the results that are produced are supposed to be extremely relevant to the search terms.  Due to this, advanced operators may cause a search engine to overlook your webpage.  However, if you place your keywords correctly, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will not be wasted.

As described above, many advanced operators limit results based upon the location of the search terms (e.g., in the URL, in the webpage title, and in the meta tags).  As such, in order to ensure that your website is discovered even when advanced operators are used, you need to include your keywords in the URL of your webpage, in the title of your webpage, and in the meta tags for the webpage.

When placing the keywords in the URL and webpage title, be careful not to abandon common sense.  Webpage titles should read like article titles.  Due to this fact, it is not possible to include every keyword you wish to utilize into the title of the webpage without the webpage title sounding ridiculous.  As such, focus on the most prominent and important keywords and include them in your webpage title.  For example, if you want to utilize the keywords “SEO,” “meta tags,” “advanced operators,” “URL titles,” and “search engine operators,” do not include every word in your webpage title.  Instead, focus on the primary keywords and construct a title like “SEO tactics for Search Engine Advanced Operators.”  Although not every keyword is utilized, the prominent ones are and the title remains readable and specific.

In addition to including keywords into your URL and webpage title, you should include the keywords in your meta tags.  Meta tags are lines of code that help web crawlers and web robots find and index your webpage.  Unless somebody is viewing the source code for your website, meta tags are not visible on your webpage.  As such, you should include all of the keywords you wish to utilize in your meta tags.  There is one caveat.  Make sure that you do not include too many keywords in your meta tags because this may cause web crawlers and web robots to view your webpage as a “spam” page.  If this happens, your webpage will not be given much relevance and will appear extremely low in the search engine results.

Advanced operators limit the search engine results by, among other things, limiting results based upon the location of the keywords.  If you have not properly planned your SEO efforts, advanced operators may cause search engines to exclude your webpage from the results list.  In order to combat this problem, you must make sure that, in addition to appearing in the text of your webpage, keywords appear in the URL, webpage title, and meta tags of your webpage.

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