817 – Level up on search: Tom talks Improving Search Part 1

Episode 817 – Improving Search Part 1
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 817 of Screw the Commute podcast. This is part one of a two part series on improving search in both Google and on your website. In other words, can you find what you're looking for easily and fast? And can the visitors of your website do the same? Today, I'm going to be improving your search efficiency when you are searching for something, and Monday will be improving the search function on your website. That'll be episode 818, so watch for that. Hope you didn't miss episode 816. That was how to run retreats. You don't have to have a big honkin estate like I do to do retreats. You can do them in hotels and even crazy yurts out in the wilderness. Check that out. Episode 816. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 816. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com, and grab a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Okay, let's get you more efficient when you search Google or many of these techniques, work on other search engines as well. And Monday in episode 818, we'll be talking about making sure people can find things easily on your website.

[00:01:49] Now there are ways you can search that give you a better chance of finding what you're looking for more accurately and faster. One of the things I kind of laugh at has to do with or without putting quotation marks around your search. I get people all the time telling me there are some outrageous number of pages that come up with their search term. The number is so high that the person gets discouraged that there's too much competition, and they don't even try developing their idea because the competition and noise seems insurmountable. Now, don't get me wrong, just about everything has competition, but simple quotation marks can give you a more accurate picture of the number of pages that have that term on it. And remember, just because a term is on a page doesn't mean that page is your competitor. For instance, if a page talks about the value of getting good at public speaking, it could just be a page about great leaders. And they don't sell anything about public speaking like I do. Okay, let's let's take that same term and plug it into Google. And at the time of this recording, there are nearly 4 billion pages that come up. All right. Now, I would discourage the heck out of you right. To to develop stuff on public speaking. Well, I went back to Google and put quotation marks around the term public speaking and did the same search.

[00:03:25] Only 103 million pages came up. Now again, that sounds like a crazy big amount, but it's actually 39 times less pages that come up. So. So why the big difference? When you search for a term like public speaking without quotation marks, Google is counting up all the pages in its index that have the word public. And the word speaking on the page, but they don't necessarily have to be together. And that changes the whole entire meaning of the term public speaking. When you have public speaking written together on one part of the page, it could say, speaking tonight at our board meeting, and the board meeting is open to the public. Well, that certainly is not a competitive page to me. When I sell public speaking stuff without the quotation marks, those words could be anywhere on a page and in any kind of context. When you put the quotation marks, those words are now sort of, let's say, glued together and give you a more accurate picture of how many pages are out there with that exact term. That's called an exact search. And again, I remind you, many of those pages are still not competitors to you. If you sell public speaking stuff. So use quotation marks around terms when you want results that are very specific to that term. Okay. What else can you do with search? There's there's lots of stuff.

[00:05:05] I'm going to give you some more examples here, and then I'll give you how to search for more of these things. Here's an example from my own sites. After all these years, I got so darn many pages out there I frequently can't remember one that I haven't promoted for a while, or a listener to this podcast. Heard me talking about something three years ago and and asked me something about one of my web pages. Well, you know that I mentioned on that episode from a long time ago. I may remember the page was on a certain site, let's say like antion.com. So I do a site search and here's how you do it. Before you do your search, you put the term site site with a colon on it. No spaces in it. Site colon. And then you put the websites you want to search on. No spaces in the whole thing. Then after the website. So you got site colon and then the website space, and then you put what you're searching for. And guess what? You can still use the quotation marks for whatever you're searching for, just like I mentioned before. So here's an example site colon antion.com space quotation mark public speaking Uma quotation mark. And that takes me right to the place I wanted to go, to remember where in the heck I put all this public speaking uma I have now.

[00:06:41] This can be for any site you want to search, not just your own site. But you might ask Tom why not just use the search function of the website? Well, that's a good question, but maybe they have a crappy search function on their website and you know something's on there because you saw it there before. So you can give this search query a try site colon and then the site you're trying to do and then what you're searching for. Now I'm going to go over and proving site functions on your site on Monday. So people don't have to resort to these techniques for your website anyway. Okay. Next let's talk about excluding things that you don't want to come up in your search because they're just wasting your time. Let's say you were searching for a high quality, dependable countdown timer for your website. You're willing to pay for it. You could search for website, countdown timer and then the minus or dash sign and then the word free. Now no space between the minus and the word that you want to exclude. And it'll bring up all the sites that have countdown timers that don't have the word free on them. You got to be careful with this one, because some of the best programs may have a free trial, and they would be excluded from your search results if you did this.

[00:08:02] But there's many times if you start using these regularly, you'll see, oh boy, I'm getting all these results that I don't want. I'm going to put minus. And then the word that I don't want. And it excludes all the riff raff, so you don't have to sift through it. All right. Here's another one. Let's say you wanted a certain file type. So here's a search I recently did. And it's ham radio frequency chart. And then a space file type. That's all one word colon PDF. That whole string is is I wanted to find a PDF on ham radio frequencies. And so file type is colon. Pdf is all one string with no spaces after the ham radio frequency chart, which I put in quotation marks. So that'll bring up just PDF files that I can print out and hang up on the wall so I can remember the frequencies. All right. Now let's say you can't remember part of what you were searching for. For instance, I like Abe Lincoln quotes, but sometimes I can't remember the exact verbiage. So one of the ones is I will something I can't remember what. And someday my time will come. I can't remember the word exact word. It was in there. So I'll put an asterisk where that word that I can't remember.

[00:09:27] So I put in, I will asterisk and someday my time will come. And then the word prepare came up. So I will prepare. And someday my time will come. Which is what I preach to all you people out there. Too lazy to do that. And then you cry to me when you when something screws up. Okay, that's another subject. But again, you might say, Tom, why don't you just search for Abe Lincoln quotes? Well, I could easily do that, but then I'd have to sift through all of them to find the one I wanted. So trust me, the asterisk technique when searching, that can do wonders for you. And guess what? It works on many of your computers. So when you can't remember the complete file name you gave something, throw an asterisk in as part that you can't remember and it'll bring up. It'll narrow down your search to some and you'll say, oh, there's the one I wanted. See? So I use that all the time because, you know, doing this 29 year straight, I've got tens of thousands of pages and documents and products and everything. So these, these things really save you a lot of time. And there's like I said, there's tons more of these. Just search with quotation marks, Google search shortcuts, and then pick the ones you think you'll use and commit them to memory.

[00:10:50] One of the things I teach my students is to force yourself to use it all day for three days in a row, force yourself, and then you'll own that shortcut. And then. Do that for a month. You'll have ten new shortcuts that'll totally make you screamingly fast compared to what you are now when you're searching. Or I do that with computer shortcuts too, like, you know, control V and control C and control Z and X and all those different ones that just make me lightning fast on a computer. So there you go. Check it out. Use these shortcuts and then watch. Monday we're going to show you how to improve search on your site. So people that don't know these tricks can find stuff easily. How about that? And of course if you want help with this and the billion other things you need to be successful online, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And if you're a parent or grandparent, I implore you, implore you to check out my page at screwthecommute.com/anticollege because this I got to tell you this. What they're doing to your kids and your grandkids right now is criminal. So I don't want that to happen to you. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/anticollege. And I will catch you Monday to show you how to search better on your website. See you later.