A Quick Guide to Using Google Search for SEO

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 the more white hat side of SEO.

And while that can be difficult, learning to use Google’s search operators can make the task much easier.

While you would learn this better if you visit an SEO class, but you would get some useful pointers in this article as well.

So without further ado, let’s jump in.

A quick and effective way to get some great SEO results is to simply use the links that are working for your competitors and helping them rank high in Google.

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.”

There are not many in the SEO world that haven’t heard of guest posting. It’s one of the oldest but still one of the most effective types of SEO techniques.

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 looking for here:

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 also use the others 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 involved putting your competitor’s name instead of the keyword. This would make Google return results which include sites where your competitor has got guest post links from.

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 tens or often hundreds of resources in the niche.

Some of the search operators you can use for this strategy:

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. As an example, SEO Optimizers has been using this strategy quite well for promoting their detailed infographic on using search operators for SEO.

These links are exactly what they are named: online directories. They usually are not 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.