SEO is a great way in which to market your business – and a vital aspect of ensuring that your site climbs the search engine results pages is link building. Search operators are widely underestimated tool which can help you in your link building endeavors. Ultimately, their main strength is the way in which they can pinpoint potential link targets with minimal effort.
Since the Farmer/Panda update to Google’s algorithm; SEO professionals are finding that directory submissions, link farms and article submissions no longer cut the mustard. To find links with true worth, link builders must now look at guest blogging, social bookmarking and link baiting to find quality links that really improve website ranking. To find such sites, there are a variety of search operators which make the process much easier than it would otherwise be.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to gain backlinks to your website. Most webmasters understand that a backlink or two is more than fair in trade when provided with quality, worthwhile content for their site. However, some webmasters are still inevitably averse to allowing guest posts. The following search operators can help you to distinguish between these and the blog owners who would definitely be interested in your content:
inurl:“write for us” OR “write for me” + KEYWORD
inurl:"submit article" + KEYWORD
intitle:"guest post" + KEYWORD
inurl:"guest article" + KEYWORD
“Guest bloggers wanted” OR “guest blogger wanted” + KEYWORD
If you ensure that you cover all the keywords associated with your industry, these five search operators alone should provide a wealth of opportunity.
Directories, Forums and Others
There are also certain search operators which can help you find lower quality links from directories and comments. These include:
intitle:"forum" [KEYWORD]
intitle: "directory" [KEYWORD]
KEYWORD "submit * site"
KEYWORD intitle:"submit * url"
KEYWORD intitle:"suggest * website"
If you have any of your own which have proved particularly effective please let me know! I’d love to hear from you if these have helped you out in any way!
