A Detailed Guide on Advanced Search Operators for SEO Link Building

Google is by far the most dominant search engine in the world, taking up a 78% market share. The next-closest competitor is Baidu, but that only has 10% share of the market and processes less than 20% of the same search volume that Google handles on a daily basis. Not to mention it’s based in China and has little bearing on the activities of the outside world. It’s impossible to overstate just how important optimizing a site for Google is.

Of the billion or so searches that Google handles in a day, about 20% of them are unique – nobody has searched them before, but the information probably does exist on the internet. One of the most effective ways of ranking better on Google is by using search operators.

How to Use Search Operators and Punctuations

Search operators can be thought of as Google’s secret power to helping users find exactly what they are looking for. There are two basic types of operators: basic and advanced.

Basic Search Operators.

Take the common example of a person looking to find the price of a phone they have been saving up for. The ‘$’ operator can be made use of like so: “$500 Nokia 1110.” This should bring up Nokia 1110s in the $0-$400 range. As a marketer, the following basic operators may be more useful:

• Related, used like “related:youtube.com”. This returns a list of results that are related to, in this case, ‘youtube.com’.
• Site, used as ‘site:mozilla.org’, which returns a list of all the URLs indexed by ‘mozilla.org’.
• Info, used as ‘info:facebook.com’, returning information about the linked site.

Advanced Search Operators

Advanced search operators are arguably more useful than the basic ones, and they are indeed more versatile. The most common ones include:

• allinanchor: ‘allinachor: artificial intelligence’. This operator returns only pages that contain the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’ in anchor texts to the page
• allintext: ‘allintext:email marketing’. This operator restricts resulting search results to those that contain the specified text in the page’s body
• allintitle: ‘allintitle:SEO ranking’. This operator will only give back results that have the specified query in its page title.

How They Can be Useful

Now, how can all these queries be useful to the average marketer? By using them, of course. For instance, let’s say you want to find a blog that accepts sponsored posts. You could search for it as so: ‘intext:sponsored post’. Maybe you just want to find resources to boost your marketing efforts. This can be found like “intitle:tools for market research”.

Lastly, why not use these and more search queries to find sites that can link to you and form a partnership!