Google supports query words that have special meaning to Google. These are known as advanced operators and modify a search in some way or tell Google to do a different type of search. Quite a few of these operators use punctuation instead of words and quite a few of them are accessible from the Advanced Search page of Google. Here is a list of the more common types and what they do.

1. link: Using the query [link:www.webpage.com] will list web pages that have links to the web page you specify. Make sure you do not put a space between the “link:” and the web page URL.
2. related: The query [related:www.webpage.com] will list web sites that are similar to the web page you specified. Again, you cannot leave a space between the colon and the web site specified.
3. site: This query [site:www.webpage.com] allows Google to restrict the results to the web sites in the given domain.
4. allintitle: This query [allintitle:example search] restricts the search results to ones with all of the query words in the title.
5. intitle: [intitle:example search] restricts the results to documents containing the word you search for in the title.
6. allinurl: [allinurl:example search] limits the results to ones will all of the query words in the URL. This query works on words only and not URL components.
7. inurl: [inurl:example search] confines the search results to documents containing that word in the URL.

Keep in mind there can be no space between the colon and the first word in any of these queries. Using these advanced Google searches as well as the additional ones found on Google can help you with your search engine optimization

We use this keyword ranking tool (Download Rank Checker) at least a couple of times a day to check keyword rankings quickly.  In addition, we use the .CSV export to show the rankings to clients and potential clients.  The rankings are tracked for the Top 200 rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Additional features include the ability to set a preset list that will let you re-check at a later date as well as the history of the keyword preset lists.  Once a preset list is setup, you can schedule the Firefox extension to run at a set time…be sure to set you search interval to between 4-7 seconds so you are being ‘friendly’ to search engines.

This product review of Wordtracker is by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
and covers some useful keyword research techniques.

Basically, keyword research should begin with looking at your current web logs or analytics reports since basically these keywords should have some type of ranking. The logic is that you can probably rank for similar keywords.

The key to using a keyword research tool is to start with general themes like ‘chocolate’ and then find other keywords like ‘white chocolate’ and ‘chocolate truffles’. Once you identify some of these, you should visit competition to see how they have ranked.

According to SEOQuake, the more keywords in a search results the better lower quality sites did in the results. This long tail strategy can be good for sites that don’t have the authority to rank for competitive keywords.

Quintera shows keyword phrases that people might be using by relating keywords from the top Google SERP results.  There are lots of keyword tools that can be used for ideas as part of the discovery process.  Be sure to review keywords volumes as part of the input, but don’t rely on the data from any of the tools.

Google’s keyword tool not only provides keyword variations but you can also plug in a url and Google will use the content of the home page to pull relevant keywords.  Compete also provides a traffic / ranking based keyword terms that allows you to ‘spy’ on your competition.

Picking the right keywords can lead to traffic quickly if you the right modifers.  Only half of the search queries on Google are unique, so be sure to use modifiers that might include product names, brands, and action items like ‘buy’, ‘price’,'order’, ‘cheap’, etc.  For another example, clothes might have modifiers like ‘loose’ or ‘tight’.  Aaron Wall gives a lot of good ideas regarding the type of keyword modifiers that might be used and these items could potentially be used for on-page body copy.

Rand at SEOMoz does a good walk-through of the Keyword Research Process and how site hierarchy should be more important than just Keyword Demand. This is a common question that we come across as we try to interpret keyword volume research and overlay it into a website.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Implementing Keyword Research from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Once keyword research is complete, it is time to overlay the identified keywords into the meta data and on page body copy (a writing task) and modify the site architecture and link structure (a development task). While not specifically mentioned, this is an excellent time to evaluate Page Rank sculpting and attempting to silo content.

Rand is putting this all under a Keyword Research and Implementation, while we tend divide this overall process into several smaller steps:

• Keyword Research – Brainstorm, research, presentation and sign-off by client.
• Meta Data – Mapping of target keywords to the website pages.
• SEO Content Optimization – On page body copy improvements to support target keyword by page.

While we break this up into some small deliverable items, we do view the overall process as one complete exercise to improve the on-site factors that affect SEO.

We receive a lot of questions about reporting differences between Google Analytics and Google Paid Search, here are some of our thoughts regarding this:

1. Browser limitations: There are limitatiation in older browsers where the referring information isn’t passed correctly, this can lead to differences in the statistics.
1. Click Fraud – Yahoo & Google don’t count every click or visitor that comes through the system.  This leads to GA visitors and no reported clicks.
2. Counting Methods – Google Analytics sets a different cookie than counting a click-through.  If 5% of internet isn’t using cookies (or robots are following content ads) then GA will count the visitors higher than the clicks.  This could lead to multiple GA visitors and only one reported click.
4. Page Loads – If your page runs slow, a click is counted…but the JS script isn’t ran properly.  This will lead to one click and no visitor.
5. Shared IP address: Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign the same IP address to multiple computers. Your AdWords account statistics will reflect multiple clicks that occur from the same IP address, while your third-party tracking software may not.

With all of these potential reporting differences, all your tracking mechanisms will tell you a different story.  Our advice is to use a 3rd party tool to act in combination with Google Adwords data….you can’t assume that Google Analytics and Google Adwords (even with Auto-Tagging turned on) will work with each other and report similar data.