How to find more free stuff with Google
Whenever you add the word "free" to a search engine query, you're practically begging for spammy or infective links to start appearing on the search engine result pages, but there's a cool trick from Bittbox that I'd like to share with you. How to avoid getting too many junk sites in your results.
It's the site: element of a Google search and it's designed to help you search a specific website, but what it's also really handy for is returning results from relevant websites very quickly, and it saves you a bundle both in time and hopefully money.
Let's say for example you'd like to find free WordPress themes. A typical Google search result for free WordPress themes (click the link to see your own results) will return 87,100,000 results with many of them being of a questionable nature but by simply adding the site: search parameter you can limit the results to a specific website such as WordPress.org which has the repository of thousands of free, GPL themes.
For example ... site:wordpress.org free WordPress themes returns 35,000 results while site:wordpress.org free WordPress themes "cafe" (the word cafe will improve the chances of finding a theme suitable for a coffee shop in this example). Since search engine technology is often overly exhausting and complex for website owners to fully implement, it's often best to allow websites such as Google to do the heavy lifting and return the best results within that website.
There are of course multiple other ways to use Google to find more free themes, graphics or tools to help small businesses but I think one of the most overlooked is the Advanced Search functionality at Google. The advanced search tool allows you to add specific words or phrases to include in your search, but also allows you to exclude words, this allows you to easily customize the results in a timely manner.
I think sometimes when we think about making money with a website, it's easy to forget that saving money is still additional profit.
