Turn Your Search Questions Into Queries

I don’t think I need to stress the importance of link building any longer. It is clearly an important factor in raising a site’s visibility in the SERPs. As I have also mentioned before, guest posts are one of the main methods used to gain a link. That is why it is so important for someone in SEO to be able to understand and use search queries and boolean operators in order to find link building opportunities.

An article posted on searchenginepeople.com and written by Yaniv Kimelfeld discussed the importance of the query used to find guest post opportunities. The main tip I took away from the article was “find the patterns.” For example, if you are looking for guest posts on someone’s blog it is important to determine the many different keywords can be used (a thesaurus is helpful in this case). Kimelfeld mentioned that guest, contributor and freelancer used in conjunction with blogger, writer, or author can narrow in on a guest post opportunity. Pairing those terms with post, article, story, review, etc. can help further narrow in on an opportunity.

Thanks to Kimelfeld’s article and my experience at SEER, I have been able to formulate more involved queries that have helped narrow my search results significantly. Let’s try an real-life-blog example. If I was trying to find a guest post opportunity for a client of mine that was a restaurant in Philadelphia I would use the following query:

(Philadelphia OR Philly) AND (restaurant OR diner OR cafe) AND (guest OR contributor OR freelancer) (blogger OR writer OR author) (post OR article OR review) AND (intitle:”write for” OR intitle: “write for us” OR intitle:”contribute to” OR intitle:”guidelines”)

What if I was a student looking for undergraduate scholarships in the areas of marketing , finance, and engineering? Here is the query I would use:

(inurl:scholarships OR inurl:grants) AND (undergraduate OR allintitle:future students OR allintitle:current students) AND (scholarships NOT grants) (intitle:engineering OR intitle:marketing OR intitle:finance)

The point of creating search queries is to find what you are looking with more relative ease. Think about it as if you are talking to someone with which there is a large culture gap. In fact, take a look at this funny clip where Emma Watson describes how the culture gap between the U.S. and the U.K affected her in college:

Using queries when searching avoids this confusion problem that Emma ran into. Taking the example from the video – if I were to be searching for band-aids or erasers in the UK, I would have to include these in a query: (band-aid OR plaster) and (eraser OR rubber). Using synonyms for words can expand your search and sometimes it can help narrow in on the topic you wish to find.

If you have any questions, need help forming a query, or want to know how I would form a query for a specific topic, feel free to comment. I would love the feedback. Until next time, search away!