Search engine techniques are a set of methods that can help you find what you need online. They include using the right keyword phrases in your content, adding structured data to your website and making sure it can be crawled by search engines.

Getting a great search result requires knowledge of how the search engine works and how to use its features. These techniques are usually very useful and can save you a lot of time searching for what you need on the internet, so they’re definitely worth mastering.

The first thing you should do is think about your search needs and what you want to achieve with the results. It may be that you just need to see a list of the top 10 websites, or that you have a specific phrase in mind and you need to track down a particular person, a brand or product, or something else entirely.

A basic search is fine, but if you need to narrow down your search, the more precise you can make it, the better. The best way to do this is with a phrase or exact phrase search.

Another important technique for finding exactly what you need is to use quotation marks. When you put a phrase inside quotes, you’re telling the search engine that it should group all results with that phrase together.

This will drastically cut down on the number of results it returns to you, which is perfect for when you’re looking for something extremely specific. However, you should be careful not to stuff too many words in there or you could miss out on some really helpful results.

Excluding a term from your search is also an effective way to narrow down your results. If you only want to see results for a brand of jeans, for example, you can exclude those from your search with the minus sign (-jeans).

You can also search by date range and use the “search result by time” technique. This is especially useful if you need to find a specific piece of information in a certain period of time, such as a blog post from last month that you missed.

To improve your search precision, you can use Boolean logic and the operators. The operators are simple linking words that let you control the precision of your search, and if you know how to use them correctly, they can make your searches much more precise and efficient.

The truncation operator (*) is another useful search technique for narrowing down the results you get. This is often called a wildcard because it allows you to search for multiple forms of a word with a single search.

Using a wildcard will not always work well, however; some terms won’t be included at all by the search engine. It’s best to use a more precise search method, like the plus operator or tilde, if you have specific terms that aren’t being found.