This article was inspired by Jill Whalen of High Rankings(r) Advisor.
So you make the best banana cream pie in the world and you want everyone to know about it and order it from your web site. You figure a top 10 ranking in Google will help do the trick but how do you know who your search engine competition is?
You can type the words banana cream pie into Google and you’ll find that Google reports 1,470,000 search results that have those 3 words somewhere in their content. That’s a lot of pie. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these sites have anything to do with banana cream pie; could be a blogger talking about how he prefers bananas with cream to pie.
If you enclose the words in quotes, e.g., “banana cream pie”, then your forcing Google (or any search engine) to only return search results that treat the words as a single phrase. This yields 267,000 results for the phrase “banana cream pie” – still a whole lot of pie. But who’s really working to attract visitors interested in banana cream pie? You can make the assumption that if their serious BCP purveyors they will have optimized their site for the term and, accordingly, it will show up in the title tag. Google allows you to search for web pages who have included the phrase in the pages ‘title tag‘ by using the ‘intitle‘ search parameter like this: intitle:”banana cream pie”. This returns 597 listings for web pages with banana cream pie in the title tag — a more manageable number of sites to deal with from a competitive stand point.
The ‘intitle‘ search parameter is not unique to Google. You can use it at Yahoo.com, Ask.com or your favorite search property.
