Knowing a few of the powerful search operators available in Google and Yahoo can help you with your website optimization.

First, what is a search engine operator? This is a word or symbol that has special meaning to the search engine. You'll see by the examples below just what this means and how it works.

The operator for find links

How many links to your website are found in the Google or Yahoo database? How many are there for your competitors? This number of links is an extremely important factor in the ranking of a website.

Each search engine has a unique way of deciding which links to a specified web page they will "credit". You may think you have dozens and dozens of incoming links to your web pages. But until you check with the search engines you won't know for sure how many or which ones they list in their database.

Here's the magic search operator for finding links:

The search operator link: will list other webpages that have links pointing to the specified webpage. Type into the search bar link:webpage.com. For example if you type in link:internetadvertisingdictionary.com Google will show you the links pointing to the home page of this website. Make sure you leave no spaces between the term link: and the webpage.

Oddly enough you can also type in links:webpage.com (or .org, etc.). This will display more links on both Yahoo and Google. However, this is not the accepted operator in Google to find the qualified links.

How does Google currently view my site? When did they spider it last?

The search operator for finding out this information is cache:webpage. With this search operator you can find a wealth of information. By the way, the word cache in this sense means a storage place on a computer. So this tells you what Google has in storage.

For instance I typed into the Google search bar:

cache:internetadvertisingdictionary.com/internet-advertising-articles.htm. Google displayed a snapshot of what that page looked like as it appeared the last time Google spidered that page. Using this operator will also tell you the last time that particular page was indexed. As a matter of interest you can also click on a button to see what your page looks like without any images. Since search engines cannot "read" pictures this can be helpful in some aspects of optimization like making sure the actual text content of your page says what the page is about.

With both the link: operator and cache: operator you kind find information about any web page. It's important to remember that the search engines collect web pages for their data bases- not just websites. So any page can be looked up with this operators and any page of a site can be found and can rank well in a search engine. Therefore if you are looking at optimizing your website remember every page you have on that site can be part of the Google or Yahoo cache and can have its own set of incoming links.

About the Author:
Meridith Berk is a major contributor to the Internet Advertising Dictionarywhere you can find definitions and easy to read articles about advertising and marketing websites on the Internet. http://InternetAdvertisingDictionary.com