Using Search Tools for SEO - Fun with Google
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Some of Google’s advanced options seem tailor-made to help SEOs. Take the link: operator. Put that into Google’s search box with a URL, and it will tell you all the back links for that particular web page. For example, link:www.seochat.com will reveal all of the web pages that have links that point to SEO Chat’s home page.
You can use this operator at least two ways. You can find everyone who is linking to your competitor’s site and consider trying to get links from them yourself, on the theory that if your competitor’s content is relevant to the linker’s web site, then so is yours. You can also use it to help you track the success of your own link-building campaign.
You probably knew about that one, but did you know that Google can help you search for synonyms? Just use the tilde ( ~ ) in front of the word if you’re interested in finding out its synonyms. What Google returns is not a list of synonyms, exactly, but a list of sites whose content is related to that word and its synonyms. If you’re having problems coming up with keywords, you can try using this to help you brainstorm for ideas.
For example, a searcher interested in food facts, nutrition, and cooking information might put ~food~facts into Google’s search box. The first link returned is for NutritionData.com, followed by several “food facts” sites, with a couple of cooking tips and recipe sites near the bottom of the first page. The last entry on the first page is from Restaurant.org, and it features “Economic and statistical information about the US restaurant industry.”
Each of the links includes snippets from the sites, of course, and it’s interesting to see what Google put in bold in each one. Food, of course, and facts; but in the snippet from Restaurant.org, both “information” and “restaurant” are bolded, to show that they are related to “facts” and “food” respectively. Google offers many different little tricks you can do to help you with your site’s SEO. In fact, all of the major search engines offer advanced search features that can be helpful when used for SEO. All you have to do is think outside the box.
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