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Search Engine Tools Not Just For SEO
By Gennady Lager (c) 2007

Sadly, not everyone in the world knows everything about search
engine optimization. In fact, very few people know anything
about SEO or even what it is. Even fewer know any search
offerings that may help your experience as a search engine user,
a website navigator, a webmaster or researcher.

I have compiled a list of free search engine and internet tools
handy for everyone to use and improve their experience with some
useful resources. Please note that if you are an SEO
practitioner, none of these are news to you and you are well
aware of these resources. For everyone else, this is a nice
little database of handy stuff.

Google Products (http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/)
Google has developed a smorgasbord of handy tools and products
offered for free use to everyone. You can bet that they have
developed something to almost everyone's interest. Some of the
products I frequently use are Alerts, Blog Search, Earth,
Analytics, Toolbar, Image Search, Trends, Page Creator, Maps,
Gmail, Talk, and YouTube. These are only some of the
products — Google offers many more!

Search Engine Commands
Most often used by search engine professionals such as search
engine optimizers - very few others know about these search
engine commands. Knowing them can really bring information about
a specific site and its standing in the World Wide Web to light.
Here are some of the most important and generally supported
commands:

Site: - Displays all of the pages indexed by the engine of the
        site.
Link: - Locates some links pointing to the site.
Cache: - Shows the last indexed and cached version of a site.
Info: - Displays general info about a site with other search
        commands.
Related: - Shows websites that may be semantically or directly
           related to the site.

Editor's Note: The above commands all work from the Google
search form. Examples of typical usage would be as follows:

site:http://www.yourdomain.com
info:http://www.yourdomain.com
related:http://www.yourdomain.com
etc.

Some, but not all, of these commands will work in Yahoo! and
MSN as well as some other search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/)
Google's Webmaster Tools are a godsend. Once verified as the
owner via Meta tag or HTML file, you have access to a wide
variety of information from sitemaps, to links, to anchor text,
to crawl rates and errors. Best of all, GWT are always expanding
the information that is being provided and is sure to provide
more great features in the near future. In the meantime, I will
keep using it and so should you.

Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
Yahoo Site Explorer is a handy tool, similar to Google Webmaster
tools but not as robust yet, that can provide some helpful
information about a site. It can display all pages in the Yahoo
index which is always helpful in finding indexation and
duplicate content issues. But Site Explorer's bread and butter
is its "Inlinks" feature which is the most comprehensive
external link reporting tool available via search engine. The
links can be filtered by domains and URL's, but most
importantly, they are sorted from most important to least. Best
of all, you can export all of the data to a TSV file.

Keyword Research
Probably not as useful to the casual user, but for the paid
search practitioner, webmaster, or business owner, keyword
research is an important factor for developing campaigns, pages,
and business models. As free tools, I like WordTracker
(http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/) and Keyword Discovery
(http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html) although the paid
versions of these tools are much more robust.

Markup validation (http://validator.w3.org/)
The World Wide Web Consortium has developed a standard of markup
code compliance that all sites should attempt to adhere to in
order to ensure cross-browser compliance, proper rendering, and
complete search engine indexation. The W3C attempts "to lead the
World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and
guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the web."

DMCA (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/anticirc.html)
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a US law that
criminalizes the reproduction and dissemination of technology,
devices, or services that use methods to allow for the access
and ungranted use of copyrighted information. Basically, this
law provides that you cannot steal other people's intellectually
copyrighted information off the internet. If you operate a
website, make certain to understand this.

Quoted Search
The quoted search is a searching technique that is not used as
often as it should be. By employing quotations around a phrase,
you are searching for the appearance of that exact phrase in
that exact order and not just a relevant collection of those
same words on a webpage or in links pointing to a page. This is
very useful when you know exactly what you need such as product
or a famous saying.

FireFox Extensions (http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/)
FireFox is really cool! I use it all the time and cannot live
without it. It also allows for contributions from anyone willing
to do some programming and offer up a free tool. With that said,
there are many SEO tools available as FireFox extensions, but
there are also many very useful non-SEO tools for general use on
the internet, for developers, and for searching that are
extremely handy.

Google In-Search Features (http://www.google.com/help/features.html)
Ever need a quick reference search for a definition of a word?
What about a handy calculator? A search for specific file type?
Ever need to look for movie information online? Do you need a
handy weather report right out of your Google search bar? All of
this information and more is available via quick Google search.

Here are some of the commands:

Define:
Form:
Movie:
Weather:
Book:

Editor's Note: Examples of typical usage would be as follows:

Define:web development
Form:ecommerce
Movie:Hairspray
Weather:Denver
Book:Harry Potter
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Gennady Lager is an SEO Specialist for an interactive Online
Marketing Firm (http://www.sendtraffic.com/) and SEO Agency
(http://www.sendtraffic.com/) SendTraffic.com . Send Traffic is
committed to providing high quality service and results using
proven white-hat SEO techniques and ethical search engine
optimization practices and standards.
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