With black hat SEO steadily becoming a thing of the past in the SEO world, the demand for white hat link building techniques is very real. But how do you start with it when you’re absolutely new to it?
Well, if you’re reading this, then you’re in luck, as we will be teaching you how you can use advanced search operators to make Google itself provide you with great link building opportunities.
Reverse Engineering Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Perhaps the best way to find some highly effective link building opportunities is to simply research your competitor’s backlinks. To do this, you need to perform a Google search by putting in the following search operator into the search box:
Link:xyz.com site:xyz.com
When you perform this search by using your competitor site’s URL instead of xyz.com, you find all the backlinks minus their internal links, which is basically the links they have gotten from their own site.
Guest Post Opportunities
If there’s one type of white hat link building opportunities pretty much everyone in the SEO community learns and is aware of, it’s guest posting.
And that’s for a reason. There are few types of links that can be as effective as guest post links. So let’s find out below how you can find these opportunities in your niche.
Keyword “guest post”
Keyword “guest blog”
Keyword “write for us”
Keyword “contribute to this site”
And so on as the infographic has listed. Also as you can see in the infographic, a good idea is to replace the “keyword” part in the above search operators with a competitor’s name who’s doing well in your niche. It will help find guest post opportunities that they have already used.
Resource Link Building
Resource link building is basically reaching out to people in your niche that manage resource pages which have all the useful websites in the niche listed as resources on them. Needless to say, these are some of the best links you can get but you need to have really high-quality, well-researched content on your site for this to work as the webmasters managing these pages will not link out to mediocre content.
You can find such resource pages in your niche by using the following search operators:
Keyword “top resources”/”top 10 resources”
Keyword “top tools”/”top 10 tools” (this could be really useful if you have developed a useful tool for your niche).
Keyword “useful sites”/”interesting sites”
You can find many more of these in the infographic here.
Sponsored/Paid Reviews
These are basically another version of guest posts. The only difference between them and guest posts is that these posts are paid for, which is a practice growing more common lately than it has been before.
So if you’re not finding luck with guest posts, these can be a great alternative (as they are much easier to get). Use the following search operators to find them through Google:
Keyword intext:”this is a sponsored post”
Keyword intext:”this was a sponsored post”
Keyword intext:”this is a sponsored review”
Keyword intext:”this was a sponsored review”
The review ones are particularly useful when you’re trying to promote a product you sell or have launched. There are a few other search operators as well here.
