This post is the second on a series on ways to speed up your search. I am exploring common yet often overlooked ways to be more effective as you research online. On our last post we discussed the importance of brainstorming. Now I want to delve somewhat on specificity.

The keywords or terms that you select for your searches are more relevant to the results than the Boolean operators or field commands you use, even more relevant than the search engine you select. Brainstorming and defining the concepts to be searched is only the beginning. Once you have selected key concepts the real work begins.

There first thing to consider as you select keywords is the specificity of the keywords which is in my opinion the highest importance. By that I mean the exactness or the narrowness with which a keyword or term covers a concept. As searchers we often search with broad terms, usually as a result of a brief scan of a job description. Taking a moment to think of a valid yet uncommon word is a valuable technique.

Let’s consider a “Cat” for instance. There would be several terms to use to look up the concept of cat. For example you can use words like feline or “house cat”, “domestic cat”, or you can do “felis catus” which is the scientific classification, or you can go the route of breed names such as Burmese, Sphinx, or Siamese. As you can see with different words we are finding different pages all related to cats. ‘Siamese is’ is more specific than ‘cat”, which is itself more specific than ‘feline’. You can do the same analysis for any keyword concept.

There is a SEO (Search engine optimization) tool known to webmasters called Wordtracker. You may find it at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Run your keywords thru wordtracker to see which ones are actually searched for, and to find other ideas that you may not have thought of or to see if you may be omitting useful synonyms.

One of the clearest advantages of seeking the most specific keywords is that you can locate a very specific reference, even if it is only mentioned a single time. In order to be specific you can use the most current terminology, or jargon, or “buzzwords” being used in any field. As a side note, a secondary issue and closely related to specificity is keyword rarety. The more unusual the term the more specific results you will achieve.

When we are searching for people the idea remains the same. Increasing the specificity of the search terms increases precision. Spend some time understanding not just what the terms mean but also how those same keywords are ranked by the search engines. The more targeted a keyword the faster it will give you the results you are looking for.