Using Effective Search Terms

It's important to be specific. If you want to find a used white 2005 Volvo station wagon for sale in Los Angeles, then you should search for that. However, if you just type, white 2005 volvo station wagon into your search engine, while you will certainly get results for white 2005 volvo station wagons, you will get a bunch of results for volvos, white cars, 2005 cars, and station wagons as well. So how do we make sure we only get results for white 2005 volvo station wagons? We need to be more specific - not necessarily in the words we use, but in how we use them.

Techniques to add specificity to a search:

Use quotation marks - This tells the search engine to only search for pages which include "these words as typed, in this order"

Whole Phrase ("white 2005 volvo station wagon los angeles") - While you might think it's a great technique for us (because you couldn't get any more specific than that)", it would actually hurt our efforts because it would be far too specific. To search with quotes around our whole phrase would tell the search engine to look for "white 2005 volvo station wagon los angeles" in that exact order, which would return no results. So while it's a good technique, putting quotes around the entire search phrase is a bad idea, unless that's explicitly what you're looking for.

Partial Phrase (white 2005 "volvo station wagon los angeles") - This would be a better choice for our example, as it could yield more results which are specific to what we're looking for. It's still too specific, however, looking for results which contain "volvo station wagon los angeles" displayed in that specific order, and as such, does not yield results. Station wagons are also commonly referred to as "wagons", and we've made two critical criteria - white and 2005 not mandatory, although the search will still look for references to those words.

Each Separate Word ("white" "2005" "volvo" "station" "wagon" "los angeles") - Now this will look for pages which include all of our terms, but they may not appear anywhere on the page together. It may also be too restrictive, as there may be results which are relevant to us, but don't list the specific words we're looking for. We would miss those results by being this specific. Also, since station wagons are more commonly referred to as "wagons", making "station" a mandatory word to look for in results works against us. It's also very cumbersome to perform searches with each words separately quoted.

Combination 1 ("white" "2005 volvo wagon" "los angeles") - Now this will search for pages that are certainly specific to what we're looking for. We've dropped "station", since it isn't really necessary, and we've ensured white is in every page returned. Every page returned should also include a reference to a 2005 volvo wagon. Unfortunately, cars are often referred to by their model name as well. And since this search returns only links to Pinterest posts, it's a little too specific for our needs.

Combination 2 ("white" "2005 volvo" wagon los angeles) - This gives us pages with "white" and "2005 volvo" in them, while also attempting to find any pages which refer to wagons, but might not have that exact word. We also do the same with "los angeles", which is a good idea, as there are many cities and neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, and the text of ads may not specifically refer at all to Los Angeles. This is much more useful to us.

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