It's important to use effective search terms, and that means using the right words in the right order. While you may find what you're looking for with ineffective search terms, using much better terms will greatly decrease the amount of time you need to spend looking through pages of results to find what you need. When you type words into a search engine, it generally assigns descending importance to them, from first to last. So, your first term will be regarded as the MOST IMPORTANT, and your last term the LEAST IMPORTANT.

If you want to find a two-bedroom duplex with a garage in Santa Monica, CA, for instance, there are many ways you can search for it - "duplex with 2 bedrooms and a garage in santa monica ca", "santa monica duplex 2 bedrooms and a garage", "santa monica 2 bedroom duplex with a garage", "santa monica 2 bedroom duplex garage" etc, etc. However, you may be surprised to learn just how different the results you get are with each different group of search terms.

Maximizing the effectiveness of your search:

We'll go through each version of the search terms used, including the types of results we get and how relevant they are to what we're looking for. We'll assume we're using Google as our search engine.

• duplex with 2 bedrooms and a garage in santa monica ca - This gets us just over 500,000 results. It is pretty specific to our search. You'll notice there are several results on the front page with the words, "duplex", "santa monica", and "garage" in them, even some with "2 bedroom" in the keywords as well. This is an effective search.


• santa monica duplex 2 bedrooms and a garage - This search also gets us just over 500,000 results, and gives us several results with "santa monica", "duplex" and "2 bedroom" in the keywords. This is also an effective search.


• santa monica 2 bedroom duplex with a garage - You should notice in the results we get with this search, there are far fewer pages with three or more of our terms in the keywords. There are also nearly 9.5 million results returned. This tells us the results include A LOT of apartments in Santa Monica, 2 bedroom or otherwise, and with or without a garage. This is not a very specific or effective search, although at first glance, it seems like it fits our needs.


• santa monica 2 bedroom duplex garage - Again, similar to our previous search terms, this gets us more than 9.5 million results. And pretty much nothing on the first page of results lists three or more of our search terms in the page keywords - another ineffective search.

The winner here for effectiveness is the first set of search terms - duplex with 2 bedrooms and a garage in santa monica ca. Although it's too wordy (prepositions are largely irrelevant in search terms, as the search engine disregards them), the order makes a HUGE difference. We've told the search engine that the most important terms to find are "duplex" and "2 bedroom", which cuts down the number of results returned significantly, since they should have both of those terms in them. Then we made "garage" the next most important term, giving us a chance to add that to the pages we find which already have "duplex" and "2 bedrooms" in them. In all our other searches, "garage" was at the end, making it the LEAST IMPORTANT term (and hence, was in very few of the top results).

Here, we made "santa monica ca" the last term. But doesn't that also make it the LEAST IMPORTANT term? Well, since the search engine can tell we're looking for housing, it's actually going to make any reference to location a VERY IMPORTANT term - even if we typed it in last. And it was probably a good idea to put "ca" after "santa monica". If you try the same search without it, you'll see there are another 200,000 results added (though I don't know where there is a "Santa Monica" other than in Los Angeles, CA).