With old SEO tools and techniques no longer being effective (and even dangerous for your site to a great extent), it’s about time for SEO marketers to switch to white hat SEO techniques. And while that can be difficult, you can simplify it by learning how to use the Google search operators.
Although it would be easier to learn this through an SEO class, you would still get some useful pointers in this article as well.
So without further ado, let’s jump right in.
Reverse Engineering Your Competitors’ Backlinks
A quick and effective way to get some great SEO results is to simply use the links that are working for your competitors. This involves finding out which sites are linking to your competitors and trying to get backlinks from those sites as well. This is what we call reverse engineering or replicating your competitors’ backlinks.
And the only search operator you need for this is “Site:CompetitorSite.com –Site:competitorSite.com.”
Guest Posting
There aren’t many in the SEO world that haven’t heard of guest posting. It’s one of the oldest SEO techniques but still continues to be one of the most effective.
But as with every SEO technique, things have changed with respect to guest posting as well. Nowadays, niche-relevant guest post links work much better than generic guest post links or getting links from sites not relevant to your site.
With that said, here are the search operators you would be using to look for these opportunities:
- Keyword “guest post”/”guest article”/”guest column”
- Keyword “write for us”
- Keyword “become a contributor”
You may find more than enough opportunities using the above search operators, but you can obviously use the other options mentioned in the infographic if you want to find more.
If you want to multiply your results, you can also use a simple trick which involves using your competitor’s name as the keyword. This would help Google return results of all the sites through which your competitor is getting guest post links.
Resource Pages
Resource pages can be used to get some great SEO juice flowing to your site, but only if your site has high-quality, non-commercial content. You can reach out to webmasters that own and manage resource pages, which are basically well-established pages in your niche that link out to multiple resources in the niche.
Some of the search operators you can use for this strategy are:
- Keyword “top 10 websites”/”top websites”
- Keyword “top 10 resources”/”top resources”/”suggested resources”/”recommended resources”
Of course, there are many more.
You may want to note though that this strategy can be used for promoting things other than content like infographics and tools as well. For instance, SEO Optimizers has been using this strategy quite well for promoting their detailed infographic on using search operators for SEO.
Directory Links
These links are exactly what they are named: online directories. They aren’t usually very powerful for your site’s SEO, but the niche relevant directories can work better than generic ones and they can still be good for diversifying your link profile, which is important as well.
You can find these using the search operators mentioned under their category, and then reach out to the directory owners using the contact info on their site.
Image Courtesy: seooptimizers.com
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