When trying to decide how to maximise the visibility of your site, it helps to have an appreciation of how people search for information using Search Engines.

When searching :-

Try to use words that are unusual, but relevant ("books" will return millions of hits on virtually every subject imaginable; "manuscripts" may enable you to track down that rare first edition you have been looking for)

Be specific where possible (search for "book reviews of Lord of the Rings", not "book reviews")

Use "Search within these results" options where available (Google etc), and start with a general search, moving to more specific searches (Search for "books", then search within for "reviews")

Learn to use quotation marks to search for phrases. If you are looking for information on apple pie recipes, you will find different results by entering the phrase different ways. If you use quotation marks ("apple pie recipes"), only results where the exact phrase is matched will be returned. Without quotation marks (apple pie recipes), any document that contains some or all of the words in the phrase may be returned

Use of Boolean operators

When searching for specific topics, you can force inclusion or exclusion of certain topics.

Boolean operators

The commands you need are :-

AND or +

AND/(+) - You can use the AND or the + command in identical ways, depending on which you are most comfortable with. Each tells the Search Engine that the results MUST contain the word or phrase after the command,

ie AND book AND review :- this searches for results that contain the word "book" and the word "review". The search +book +review will return the same list (note the space between the AND command and the search term, but no space between + and the search term; + book tells the Search Engine to look for a result that MUST contain " " and may contain "book")

NOT or -

NOT/(-) - Similar to AND/(+), but it tells the Search Engine that its results MUST NOT contain the word or phrase after the command.
ie book NOT review/book -review :- this will search for all documents that contain the word "book", and then discard all of those that contain the word "review"

OR

OR - used with phrase searches to look for many similar variations at once.

For instance:-
It is quicker to use manchester OR sunderland OR newcastle united football club, than to type out the name of each team in full. As another example, if you wanted information about cars, you could search for rover OR Vauxhall OR audi +unleaded cars. This would return information about cars from the 3 manufacturers that used unleaded fuel.

The different operators can be used with each other to construct complex searches, but pay attention to the syntax, or you can end up with very odd results.

Filtered Words

Searching for "filtered" words. To reduce the strain on their systems, many Search Engines throw away some words from a search string (see Glossary). Common words like the, of, and, it etc often are not used when searching the database.

What if you want to search on a phrase that contains them? Using AND/(+) as described above will compel their use, enabling you to search properly for return +of +the Jedi.

However, DON'T enclose Boolean terms (+/-, OR etc) in quotation marks, or they will be considered part of the search string, not an instruction. Search for +"star trek" +the +"next generation", not "star trek +the next generation"

Link Searches

Link:www.example.com and linkurl:www.example.com searches - some Search Engines offer the facility to check how many times other websites link to yours, using these commands,. This is very useful when trying to determine your "link popularity"

Use of Search Engines - Summary

Advanced users of the Web use all of these methods to find the information they want as quickly as possible. The majority of users know how to use single word and multiple word searches (without quotation marks), and frequently will use phrase searching with quotation marks. As knowledge increases, simple use of Boolean operators appears, and experts can easily construct searches with 5 or 6 terms and various commands to instantly find what they are looking for. You should consider the likely skills of your target audience, and modify your strategy to suit them.