Black Belt Web Marketing.pdf - Costa del Sol

you’ve used in the past returns adequate results. Try several using the same query. You may be
surprised at the results. Each returns different results for the same query. Remember, no search
engine is perfect in terms of accuracy or comprehensiveness. Chances are pretty good that none
will consistently outperform the others.
Don’t assume that search engines are up to date, that they display new sites. Directories such as
Yahoo manually check out new submissions. Yahoo has often been criticized for being months
behind. Many site owners have complained that they have been unable to get their site listed at all.
Search engines such as Alta Vista also have difficulty keeping up with new submissions. They can
take months to sweep the Web for new content. By the time they have completed a sweep, a lot
of new content has been added and has yet to be indexed.
Before beginning your query, make sure that you have spelled the search words correctly. Avoid
words that you’re not sure of.
You’ll save time if you take a few seconds to think about how you can refine your search in
advance so that the results will be meaningful rather than using trial and error. See below for
techniques you can use to improve search results.
Using Simple Techniques to Improve Searches
You can dramatically improve nearly all searches with a few, simple techniques. Inexperienced
searchers simply enter keywords in the search field. They are usually inundated with a list of far
too many pages to review.
The key to good searching is to narrow your search using one or more of the techniques below.
Not all search engines recognize some of these so make sure beforehand the one you are using
does:
Capitalize proper nouns.
Use ‘AND’ or ‘+’ when you want more than one word in your query to be on every page
(see the chart below).
Use quotations (") around words if they must appear next to each other. Some search
engines recognize "near" in the query to mean that multiple words must be within a few
words of each other.
Put a minus sign (-) before each word that you don’t want on the page (e.g., "Web
traffic"-railroad).
Try natural language searches. Phrase your query using natural language. For example,
"how do I ……"
Improving Your Searches with Intelligence Agents
Several major search engines allow you to progressively narrow your search. Infoseek has a
Appendix pg.39