In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google México Campus Party:

One Republic at Google:

Y! Logo Flowers:

Our Vanessa Fox Running the Pineapple 5K (hope she doesn’t kill me for this):

Cyber Monday is one of the most important (if not the most important) day to paid search professionals in America, and I’ve got some great tips and tricks to share on how to make the most of it.

But first, I thought I’d share some history of the term I found at Wikipedia:

The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation. It was first used within the e-commerce community during the 2005 holiday season. According to Scott Silverman, the head of Shop.org, the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. In late November 2005, the New York Times reported that “The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked.”

But is it actually the biggest spending day of the year? Some claim the term is inaccurate and just a clever marketing strategy.

From Business Week:

Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn’t nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It’s not even the first big day of the season.

For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What’s more, most e-tailers say the season’s top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.

Interesting…Regardless of what Cyber Monday actually represents, the reality is that the holiday season is upon us and, as paid search pros, we need to be prepared to take advantage of this highly lucrative e-commerce period.

I spoke with Chris Lien, CEO of the SEM management platform Marin Software, to find out what tips and tricks they’ve been sharing with their customers on how to do paid search correctly for the holidays.

Q. So, what does Cyber Monday mean to you?

Chris: It’s when consumers begin their heavy holiday shopping on the Internet–the official kickoff to the online holiday season.

Q. How do you think online sales will go this year?

Chris: Well, due to the economic environment we’re in, I think we’ll see a lengthening of the online holiday promotion period in order for retailers to get every last dollar they can from consumers. I noticed Macy’s has already started some pretty aggressive advertising and it’s only mid-November.

Q. Studies show that over half of people begin researching gifts before Thanksgiving, but the majority of purchases don’t occur until mid-December. How does that affect paid search pros?

Chris: Make sure to take these “early researchers” into account. Set your tracking cookies to 30 days or more to capture delayed conversions.

Q. Are there any specific keyword expansion tips you have?

Chris: Make sure you’re not just running on the same terms you have all year. Include holiday terms as well. Some 69% of shoppers plan to purchase gift cards this year (according to Google research) so don’t forget to promote gift cards in your search campaigns. Examples of potential keyword ideas to add include: “electronics gift card,” “best gift for dog lovers,” and “great gifts for under $25.”

Q. Yikes! I bet “gift card” terms just spiked in the engines. So there will be more volume on most search terms for the next six weeks, what can search pros do to make sure they don’t spend on inefficient terms?

Chris: Negative match is an important tactic to utilize. Use query mining early in the holiday season to see what unrelated searches might be triggering your ads so you can make good optimization decisions. For example, a retailer might add “gift registry” to their campaigns, but then needs to exclude the most popular registry searches which are for “Windows,” “Software,” and “Cleaner,” each of which have nothing to do with the holidays.

Q. Okay, got it. How does all of this affect bid strategies?

Chris: Historical data shows that users are much more likely to convert during the holiday season. Be prepared for increased conversion rates, and use insight to bid accordingly. Try using year-over-year data from the last few holiday seasons to understand how users will engage your keywords, ads, and sites. Of course, watch your accounts early to see what’s happening so that you make good decisions throughout the campaign.

Q. That’s good to know. Any last things to think about?

Chris: Everyone knows they can find great deals starting December 26th. So make sure to create sale-specific campaigns, keywords and creative ahead of time and schedule the campaigns to launch automatically on December 25th at midnight.

Great tips and tricks, Chris. Thank you for you for sharing. I think the biggest takeaway here is to make sure to scrutinize your paid search accounts much more often than usual during this holiday push. You want to take advantage of positive trends you will find as well as weed out inefficiencies. For many web retailers, the upcoming six weeks represent more than half of their sales, so it’s important to win now more than ever.

In my last Just Behave article, I shared a set of metrics that will help you create a powerful SEO business case for your natural search projects.

Through the process we’re now able to tell the CFO something like this: “Our addressable market spans 200,000 unique keyword markets and totals roughly 5,000,000 searches per month, of which we’re capturing 1% currently. The cost of acquiring that traffic through PPC totals $1,000,000 per month.”

That paints a compelling (perhaps rosy) picture. But what’s driving your current performance? Why do you believe you can do better? In this installment, I share three more metrics that can you help create strong baselines, set realistic expectations, and direct your campaign towards the most effective outcome.

Keyword reach

So you’re getting 50,000 searchers from natural search a month (1% CTR). But is that good or not? It depends. Are a handful of search phrases sending 99% of the traffic? Or is traffic distributed evenly across thousands of long-tail phrases? The Keyword reach metric helps you quantify the breadth of your presence to better manage it.

To understand keyword reach, start with the number of unique search phrases that drive natural search traffic to your site currently. What volume of traffic does each phrase drive? Your analytics package likely contains this basic data. But before we get excited, let’s apply a few filters.

First, differentiate brand phrases from non-brand phrases in your calculation. Why? Searches for your brand or company name are just table stakes. Don’t let yourself feel good about them. What you care about increasing is your share of the non-brand markets. Once you’ve separated these, determine the percentage of your traffic driven from brand vs. non-brand queries. Many retailers, for instance, find that as much as 95% of their natural search traffic comes from brand vs. just 5% from non-brand phrases. This confirms a big opportunity.

Now that you’ve distinguished between brand and non-brand traffic phrases, you can calculate your traffic per keyword yield rate on your non-brand phrases. If 5% of your search traffic (2,500 searchers) is from 1,000 non-brand phrases, your yield rate would be 2.5 searchers per keyword (2,500 searchers / 1,000 phrases). If your optimization is successful at increasing rankings in these 1,000 keyword markets, you’d expect to see the keyword yield increasing as well, perhaps doubling to 5.0 searchers per keyword.

For benchmarking purposes, you should also slice search phrase data by engine. This helps you avoid being misled by high level trends, and will show you if your optimization work is helping your Bing performance, at the expense of your Google performance, for example.

Last, make sure you can determine whether keyword reach is increasing or decreasing on a comparable basis, such as month-over-month (MoM) or year-over-year (YoY). This way you can measure the impact of your optimization work going forward in an objective manner.

Understanding keyword reach lets us augment our business case with some more powerful information: “Of our 200,000 addressable keyword markets, we are reaching only 1,000. These keyword markets drive 2.5 searchers/keyword. 95% of our search traffic comes from queries for [company name].”

Keyword placement

How highly do you rank in those 1,000 non-brand keyword markets that drive traffic? Can you do better?

We all know there are scraping tools to capture rankings. Rather than worry about ranking in markets no one searches for, and that you get no traffic for, what if you could determine where you rank for the thousands of phrases that did drive traffic? There are tools that tell you this by parsing the referral strings on engine traffic. Each major engine thankfully passes an argument in the URL which tells you what page of the SERPS (although not the actual position—yet) the searcher clicked on to land on your page. Naturally you want to filter these by engine.

Armed with this information, you can identify which phrases are ranking on Page1 (P1) of Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can use this of course to talk up your SEO ninja skills in front of your CEO. More importantly, you can identify which phrases are ranked on P2 or P3 etc, in each engine. Perhaps you’re ranked on Google’s Page 1 in 70% of the non-brand markets. 20% of the time you’re on P2. You can begin to imagine an SEO campaign aimed at these markets, in order to get your ranking onto P1, thereby increasing CTR and traffic by many multiples.

The keyword placement metric helps you further enhance your business case: “Of our 200,000 addressable keyword markets, we are reaching only 1,000. We rank on page 1 of Google in 70% on these keyword markets, driving 2.5 searchers/keyword. 95% of our search traffic comes from queries for [company name].”

Landing page yield

Natural search is a marketing funnel: at the top are your supply of pages which get crawled. Some percentage of those get indexed. A percentage of the pages indexed get ranked. A percentage of those get clicked, etc. So an important way to baseline current performance is to map your search traffic against the pages that drive the traffic. Surprisingly, this is more difficult than it seems. In fact, it is highly likely that you do not know how many pages are on your dynamic site (don’t worry—I won’t tell).

The easiest way we find to approximate site size is to measure the number of unique pages crawled by a particular engine over a period of time. Engine crawl has slowed recently. Review your log files for unique URLs requested by Googlebot over a 60 day time frame. Or you can run a crawler over your site. Either way, you should be able to parse highly duplicated pages from the count. For our purposes, let’s assume there were 10,000 unique URLs requested by Googlebot over the past 60 days. In other words, Google thinks your site has 10,000 pages.

Naturally, you want to compare this to how many pages Google reports having indexed. If you have just 1,000 indexed, you should investigate why 90% of the available landing page “inventory” you take to market is being rejected, and then develop strategies to address the issue.

You need to understand how many of your URLs drove search traffic. Suppose 250 pages are driving your 2,500 non-brand monthly searchers. That means 250 of your 1,000 indexed pages are performing—a rate of 25% yielding 10 searchers per page. However, you have 10,000 total pages, of which 250 are performing—an actual yield rate of 2.5%. If these were your metrics, you should have many questions:

• Why are 90% of my pages not being indexed?
• Why are 75% of my indexed pages not being found at all?
• How can I identify my non-performing pages?
• How can my 25% yielding pages achieve more than 10 searchers per page?

Asking and answering these questions leads to smarter strategies and more accountable performance.

Your business case now looks like this: “Our addressable market spans 200,000 unique keyword markets and totals roughly 5,000,000 searches per month, of which we’re capturing 1% currently. The cost of acquiring that traffic through PPC totals $1,000,000 per month. Of our 200,000 addressable keyword markets, we are reaching only 1,000. We rank on Page 1 of Google’s in 70% on these keyword markets, driving 2.5 searchers/keyword. 95% of our search traffic comes from queries for [company name]. 97.5% of our pages drive no search traffic.”

Remember, you can only manage what you measure. With these metrics, you can create performance baselines and develop data-driven SEO strategies aimed at achieving specific performance outcomes. Trust in the force, Luke.

When many online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals hear the phrase “search behaviors,” one of the immediate assumptions is the association with a text box and a button labeled “search” or “find.” In fact, usability guru Jakob Nielsen determined that this perception of web searching is so common that it is now a firm mental model.

In my opinion, too many search professionals associate search behavior with querying behavior only. In reality, web searching is more complex than simply typing keywords into a text-entry field. Website owners and search professionals alike often overlook finding behaviors after a searcher clicks on a link to a website from a search engine results page (SERP). One of those finding behaviors is called orientation or orienting.

Orientation, SERPs and landing pages

What exactly is orientation? On a website, orientation is a behavior whereby users determine their position in a website with reference to another point—establishing a sense of place.

Many times, the reference point is a home page or a website’s domain name. However, when people click a link from an organic search listing or a search engine ad, they don’t always go to a site’s home page. They most likely land on a page in the middle of the website, or a landing page created specifically as a destination from someone clicking on a search engine ad.

For web searchers to feel confident that a page or a site offers the product, service or information they desire, web pages should present clear “you are here” cues. Web searchers use a wide variety of “you are here” cues to determine a sense of place on a website—both textual and graphical cues. As a search usability professional, I want to understand which textual and graphical cues are important to my target audience. Where should these cues be placed on a web page? If it is a textual cue, how should it be formatted (color, font/typeface, white space)? If it is a graphical or multimedia cue, how large or small (in dimension) should it be? Where should these cues be placed on a category page or an article page?

Here are some questions we commonly ask web searchers during usability testing to determine their mental models before they click on a link on a SERP:

• Whose website are you about to view? How did you determine this?
• Which section of the website, if any, are you about to view? How did you determine this?
• What content do you believe you will see after clicking on this link?
• Do you believe that the information you desire will be available after you click on this link? Why or why not?

For example, if web searchers use a URL or domain name as an information scent, which is extremely common for navigational searches, they often look at the logo, which is a graphical “you are here” cue to establish ownership of the site. A tagline or a slogan can also be a “you are here” that establishes and reinforces site ownership. Web searchers can also quickly scan the URL, which is a textual cue. This orienting process occurs very quickly (often in less than 1 second) and is a normal process when people navigate from web page to web page.

The benefits of accommodating orienting behavior

Why should website owners accommodate orienting behavior? One reason is user confidence. Providing consistent “you are here” cues throughout a website communicates trust, reliability, and dependability because searcher mental models are being reinforced and validated on every page.

Additionally, consistent placement, usage and formatting of “you are here” cues are important because they decrease demands on users’ attention, allowing them to accomplish their desired goals more efficiently and with fewer errors. In other words, if searchers spend too much time trying to establish a “sense of place” on landing pages they are spending less time and effort trying to accomplish their desired goals—goals that are important to business owners as well as they lead directly to conversions (add to cart, subscribe, enroll, etc).

Finally, recognition, recall and memorability tends to increase when you have provided consistent “you are here” cues on a site. In the event that searchers wish to re-find content on sites via the commercial web search engines, retrieving that content is easier. With minimal effort, searchers encode these “you are here” cues within their memory along with the information they learn on a web page, making content easier to retrieve at a later time.

Therefore, website owners, interaction designers and search engine advertisers need to spend more time making the orienting process as quick and easy as possible. Orientation is a search behavior that no SEO professional, search engine advertiser or website owner should dismiss. Quick-and-easy orientation contributes to a positive brand experience, increases conversions and sales and makes content easier to find.

Have you ever tried to create an interesting blog on a topic that people rarely interact with? Can you really build a thriving readership of loyal fans interested in a dry topic like root canals or debt consolidation? Most likely not.

It is far easier to go where the conversation is than it is to create demand from scratch. This is why so many forms of affiliate marketing (reviews, coupons, comparisons, etc.) thrive on arbitraging established brands. If part of your marketing strategy revolves around community, discussion, and citations (links) then it helps to build your business model around where the conversation already is and what is already interested in.

Topics like sports and baseball cards are easy to build communities around because there is a constant stream of new stats, lots of media coverage, and some billion-dollar brands people are interested in. The phrase armchair quarterback shows how much people love talking about football. And fantasy sports take it one step further by allowing people to compete against each other…further tying them into the game – often with some bets and/or pride on the line.

When I think of the other topics I read about a lot, they are also ones that are rapidly changing with lots of news and opinions and stats. DNJournal is a weekly score card for the domain industry. Every week, I look there and go “what was this person thinking?” and “wow they got a steal.” Domain names represent language, which is constantly changing. As the economy went to crap, bankruptcy.com increased in value.

The same patterns hold true for keyword rankings in SEO. There is always something new to talk about because the structure of the web keeps changing, and the search engines are forced to change along with it. With each algorithmic shift, the search engines make marketers look for more clever ways to exploit it for profit – looking for everything from how to rank for higher value keywords right on through to how to cheaply and reliably spam the longtail of search.

Stocks, finance, and macro-economics are the same way as well. Every day is a new set of stats, and media is skewed to represent the interests of existing business models. Most of the media is built off of constantly selling that now is the time to buy. If you are not that well known, are new to an industry, or have limited resources behind you, it is easy to view that as a disadvantage.

But sometimes those lack of ties give you the freedom to speak truth, which make you different and remarkable. Once markets become fairly established, many players become so conflicted that there is value in being different.

Wherever you see holes in competing models that represents an opportunity to be different. Niche contrarian investor blogs like The Big Picture, Market Ticker, and Zero Hedge have become so popular that they helped lead to the launch of the recently named SEO contrarian blog. So far it has been a great read, much like JohnOn.

Three thoughts from an SEO perspective:

• What keeps changing in your market that people love to talk about?
• What stats could you create that would be remarkable and mention-worthy?
• What prevents your competitors from being honest? What can’t they write about that you can?

And if you can’t answer those questions, then it’s worth subscribing to a few more feeds until you can.

A lot of statistical data and analysis is published about SMB online activity in the top US markets, often leaving out many of the tier two cities. In this post, I will share some data on the online visibility of local businesses in Columbus, Ohio. With a population of some 750K, Columbus and its surrounding area are home to over 80K small to  medium businesses.

As it turns out, many Columbus business owners are active online, building websites, updating their listings and advertising their business on various sites. The following chart shows the percentage of Columbus SMBs who have a visible website, who have claimed their local listing, and who advertise online. The data is based on Palore’s coverage of the leading search engines, yellow pages sites and local search sites (excluding PPC ads on search engines that are difficult to track).

As always, it is important not to bundle all local businesses into one group, as different verticals often behave differently online. The chart below shows the same data for Columbus plumbers.

Interestingly, plumbers are twice as active as the average Columbus SMB when it comes to online advertising. However, they are almost half as active when it comes to publishing a website and claiming their business listing. This data is consistent with what we see in other major cities where different verticals exhibit different levels of online activity.

While this does not introduce significantly new or contradictory findings, it merely sheds some light on a tier two market that exhibits similar characteristics to those of larger markets.

Start-ups and large media companies alike tend to focus on large and prominent cities when launching new Internet services. Therefore, your typical coffee shop in San Francisco is bombarded with offers from Internet companies, offering innovative services from online table reservations and virtual coupons to sundry online advertising options.

As it turns out, your average café on Columbus’s High St. may not boast an active Twitter account, but its owner probably has some online activity and is probably more available to hear about new ways to promote his business online.

As in an-house SEO specialist, you may well find yourself solely responsible for your company’s search engine marketing. It is not uncommon for an organization to limit their human investment in SEO to a single individual, particularly for new web ventures or where existing search marketing efforts are just being brought in-house.  The challenge facing a solo SEO is, of course, producing positive results without a great deal of specialist support.

Whether you are working as a member of the marketing team, attached to the IT department, or are singularly autonomous, both search strategy and tactical execution are likely to fall on your plate. For all but the smallest websites, this will rapidly result in an enormous work-load; in addition to the time required to stay on top of developments in your field. Effective management of your time, tasks and your organization’s expectations is critical if you are to have any success at all without committing all of your waking hours to SEO.

For those who manage or are already part of an honest-to-goodness team,  I urge you to keep reading. Introducing efficiencies that help improve the life a single in-house SEO can prove equally beneficial to individuals on an SEO team.

Delegate tasks where possible

Being successful in search marketing, and in particular organic SEO, involves co-opting the talents of individuals in diverse roles in order to perform work that will benefit SEO.  For example, once you have identified that the non-www form of your website needs to be redirected to the www form, someone in IT will have to make that change.

The solo in-house SEO, however, may have to extend this principle to include what would normally be considered specialist SEO tasks, simply to lighten the load. Best practices demand that every new page generated be assigned, at minimum, a unique title tag and meta description – is there a in-house copywriter that might be suited to this task? This will substantially free up your time if there are a large number of pages being produced daily (and a writer might actually be better at, um, writing, than you).

Any specialist tasks that you may wish to delegate will almost certainly involve training a surrogate so these tasks can be performed competently. While this in itself will require a time commitment on your part, this expenditure must be measured against the time this will potentially save you in the future. If you are spending an hour a day tagging pages, and it takes a day to train a copywriter to do this, you will start to see a positive return on your investment in under two weeks!

If you are a control freak this may, of course, require some attitude adjustment. But, if you are a control freak, you may encounter other problems working in an industry predicated on trying to manipulate something you do not have control over – search engine rankings.  Good luck with that.

Outsource where possible

As you start tackling your task list, you may find there are jobs that need to be done in support of SEO for which your organization either lacks the skills internally, or where in-house resources are inadequate to accomplish these tasks in a timely fashion. Depending on your budget and the magnitude of what needs to be undertaken, you may be able to outsource some of these components.

In support of PPC, for example, outsourcing landing page design (and even testing) may be a cost-effective mechanism for improving the ROI of paid search. Similarly, programming tasks such as custom script development or CMS modifications may be most expeditiously accomplished by contracting out the work.

While it might seem counter-intuitive to outsource some search marketing as part of an in-house SEO program, this indeed might be the case where this program is a fledgling one, or there is simply too much for one person to take on. All things being equal, paid search is the most obvious candidate for outsourcing, both because immediate ROI is easier to calculate and monitor compared to organic search, and because organic search success relies more heavily on leveraging the cooperation of disparate in-house stakeholders.  Needless to say, if you have been brought on board to manage paid search, then the opposite will be true.

Automate where possible

There are often several possible realms where efficiencies can be introduced by automating either recurring tasks or reporting. To the former, simple on-site SEO such as creating headings, titles, meta data or even image alt attributes might be automated by programmatically pushing database fields to the appropriate on-page locations. For reporting, look for opportunities where configuring analytics reports might obviate the need for manual data extraction, or where tools might be developed or purchased to track rankings, back links or other statistical SEO data.

As in the case of de facto task delegation, automating processes might require you to put in a bit of dedicated time up front, but save you a lot of effort in the long run.

Manage management

Here is a very common real-life scenario. A company has just taken the plunge and committed to an in-house SEO program, and management (largely uninformed about how SEO works) wants a projection on the financial impact of improved search engine rankings in the next quarter (or year, or whatever). There’s no been prior investment in SEO, so rankings are virtually non-existent, as are (in consequence) traffic or conversion numbers associated with organic search.

There are basically two responses. You can dedicate a week or two coming up with complex formulas based on different keyword ranking and conversion scenarios, and produce a very pretty spreadsheet populated with numbers that are basically bunk. Or you can be honest:  SEO efforts are just underway; there is no historical data that can be used to create meaningful predictive models, and any numbers I could come up would basically be bunk.

The benefit of the honest approach is, of course, that you are able to spend a couple of weeks productively employed on optimization tasks that will eventually impact your company’s bottom line, rather than delaying that success by wasting time in pointless speculation about those bottom-line improvements.

This is not to say that you should expect management to nod understandingly when you tell them that producing the report they desire is a waste of time:  you obviously need to explain why. But if you are afraid to be forthright, you may not only find yourself wasting time, but find yourself in a very unpleasant meeting in three months’ time, trying to explain why the metrics fall far short of your bogus projections.

Taking the reins of a search marketing program is, in general, not for the timid, and this is doubly true if you are solely accountable for the success or failure of SEO efforts. In order to attain search engine success, you need to be prepared to argue for resources, counteract initiatives which may harm organic search, demand better SEO support from recalcitrant colleagues or company units, and autonomously prioritize (or even veto) tasks based on your knowledge and expertise.

This is why the word “aggressive” should be thought of as laudatory, rather than pejorative, in the context of an in-house SEO professional – that is, not one who possesses an abrasive personality, but an individual who is willing to fight for what is needed for success, without slavishly deferring to superiors when they impede progress.

Find time for professional development

You may believe that time spent catching up on blogs, participating in forums, reading books or attending conferences are secondary in importance to “real” SEO work, and that these activities must always be sacrificed (or delegated to off-work hours)  in the face of an ever-increasing task list.

This is wrong-headed on two counts. First, if you fail to keep up on developments in the search marketing work, you will eventually miss out on opportunities to introduce efficiencies or re-prioritize your tasks based on new information. You may even find yourself laboring away on techniques that have since proven to be obsolete!

Second, you were hired to run in-house SEO at least in part because of your professional knowledge. In a field as dynamic as search engine marketing, that knowledge will rapidly prove obsolescent without dedicating time to stay on top of industry developments. You need to strike a balance with your other tasks, of course, but it is essential to carve out some time for professional development; and factually and forcefully respond to any colleague or superior who suggests such efforts are tantamount to slacking.

Always be tactical

When you are packing it in for the day, make a habit of asking yourself the question, “what did I do to improve SEO for my site today?”  The answer should never be “nothing.”

Strategic planning does not improve your rankings. A day of keyword research will not improve the ROI of your paid search unless you apply it to a campaign. Participating in the world’s greatest meeting does not result in a great inbound link to your site.

Yes, planning is vital to future search engine success, and you may have no choice but to put together a report for the CMO – but, as the only SEO in the house, if you are not making active contributions to improving your search rankings, nobody else is. Always try to find an hour or two in the day to actually do something impactful, even if it is as small as redirecting a URL that 404s, adding an alt attribute to that new button, or responding to that blogger who is poised to link to you.

Not all in-house jobs are created equal

Before you sign on the dotted line, make sure you know what is in store for you as an in-house SEO. This fictional job description is closely modeled on many real postings I have seen: SEO specialist required for growing website. Responsibilities include on-page search engine optimization, inbound link development, PPC management, making HTML changes to the main website, developing PHP scripts, writing content for two blogs, creating landing pages and developing marketing campaigns.

One of the satisfying aspects of working as an in-house SEO is that the job is usually anything but monotonous, but the diversity of daily tasks can obviously be taken too far.  At a certain point your chances of search success are going to decline in proportion to the breadth of your responsibilities. Taking on sole responsibility for an in-house SEO program is challenging enough:  make sure the job is at least focused on SEO.

Lately, when we talk to prospective B2B clients, I see increasingly divergent views on B2B blogging. On the one hand, there are those who lust after success stories involving other social media (e.g., Twitter) used to drive high amounts of immediate, short-term traffic to a business blog. Many times, these people are so eager to jump into the promise and immediacy of Twitter, LinkedIn groups, and Facebook to drive traffic to a blog, that they give little consideration to developing the meaningful, valuable content required to attract interest in the first place.

On the other hand, there are those that tend to lump B2B blogging in with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social-bookmarking sites, and the like. Many of these people are in niche B2B industries where the pace of adoption of social media vehicles is slow and the potential “crowd” is thin. When they consider blogging as a part of their marketing strategy, they see little promise. Sure, they say, maybe we’ll get 20 subscribers to our blog, but what good is that? We’re not going to get large amounts of followers on Twitter. We’re not going to get large amounts of subscribers to our blog. Social media just isn’t a good fit, whatever form it comes in.

Both groups seem overly focused on the short-term, either somewhat crazed by the potential of short-term gains or convinced that such gains aren’t possible, and as a result, dismissing the very idea of B2B blogging. Both groups tend to ignore the long-term, most valuable benefits of B2B blogging—search visibility and thought leadership positioning.

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Cohen of Social Media B2B, had a great post titled Blogging for the Future, in which he discussed the long-term search benefits of consistently creating relevant, compelling content optimized for search. Even a modest commitment of 2-3 such posts per month will yield 30 posts in a year—and each of those posts will consistently drive relevant traffic to your blog and your site every single month. Forever. And the beauty of search is that you’ll be meeting those visitors at the very time they’re interested.

In addition to driving traffic, those posts will also position your firm in terms of expertise and thought leadership. This enhanced search visibility and positioning can go a long way in reducing the perceived risk potential purchasers feel when considering alternative suppliers, strengthening your position and increasing the chances you’ll be on the short list of contenders.

Sure, this isn’t as sexy as creating a lot of social media buzz in the marketplace, but unless you’re blogging for the long term, I doubt you’ll be successful in the short term, anyway.

Managing your health requires achieving a balance between diet and exercise. In the same way, a healthy paid search campaign requires achieving a balance between branded and non-branded spending. Working together, the two create an optimal mix that will help you achieve the best results possible.

Why balance matters

Given branded terms’ reputation for delivering ROI, they often receive the lion’s share of a paid search budget. However, in this economy—where consumers are still hesitant to purchase—many marketers are not seeing the revenue from their branded terms that they had hoped for. As a result, they are desperate to find other means to boost revenues.

Fortunately, targeting non-branded terms can help you do exactly that. In fact, doing so not only has the potential to drive revenue, it can also increase brand awareness and spur growth—3 great reasons to invest in non-branded terms. Let’s take a closer look at each:

Growth. A paid search campaign that only spends on branded keywords will only grow as much as the brand recognition allows. By only investing in your brand, you leave growth opportunity to your competitors who are willing to make the non-branded investment. True growth, beyond the brand, comes from non-branded investment. If you are only investing in branded spend, year over year growth will be a reflection of your brand and the investments you’ve made towards it alone. In order to see year over year growth in paid search, you need to invest in non-branded spending.

Branding. If you want to increase brand awareness, you need to run paid search advertisements on relevant non-branded terms. After all, the search funnel begins with research, often with non-branded searches. Given that, it is important to get your brand in front of searchers when they are beginning their research. Ad copy that reflects your brand name may be one of the first touch points you have with that new user. Employing tracking that attributes the sale appropriately across each marketing touch point with that user will qualify your investment in non-branded terms that results in branded conversions.

Revenue. If your goal is to increase revenue from the dollars you invest, non-branded investment is an opportunity that has proven profitable for marketers. With accurate attribution management/reporting, non-branded spending can reflect its own profitability and that of your other marketing initiatives. Such attribution will be key to helping you find the optimal balance between branded and non-branded terms, and allow you to see how they are balancing each other in regard to ROI. In addition, this style of asset management may also teach you a thing or two about your consumers. In essence, it will allow you to leverage the data from your non-branded investment to improve your overall marketing and increase your bottom line.

Keys to achieving balance

But before you can configure your optimal balance between branded and non-branded terms, you first need to establish your minimum threshold of return. For example, if you could make $2 for every $1 you invested would you do it? Could you afford to make such a low return? Or, can you afford not to? Would it be better for your competitor to be spending that dollar and making two? Compared to the return you get from your branded spend, a 2:1 return doesn’t look that great. However when you are looking for maximized returns and growth, it spells possibility. Once you know your minimum threshold, you’ll be ready to push your investment to get the maximum return possible with the branded/non-branded mix.

While it can be tempting to solely focus on branded terms, smart marketers will incorporate non-branded terms into the paid search marketing mix in an effort to achieve the optimal balance that will deliver the most profitable return.

Advanced link building queries, for the link builders who use them extensively, remain a closely guarded secret. It’s easy to understand why. For one, they want to protect a valued link source from getting flooded with link requests from the general link-seeking public. Secondly, there are some choice opportunities out there that would lose their value if the entire SEO community happened to learn about them.

Another complication with discussing and sharing link building queries is that they’re often tailored towards the linkable and shareable assets of a particular organization. Further, two businesses within the same vertical may have widely different linkable assets, and therefore will need to seek different link targets, which requires different queries.

Despite their link-protecting reticence and the complexity of communication, the 21 link builders I surveyed delivered a highly-valuable array of advanced link building queries. Thank you to all who participated!

Framing the process

In my questions, I asked link builders to respond within this framework:

1. Linkable Asset. Definition: what’s “linkable” varies from vertical to vertical. Cash is almost always a linkable asset, as are available jobs, events, expertise for interviews and many other forms of great content.
2. Link Target. Definition: what types of sites, pages, and people seek this linkable asset?
3. Link Prospecting Query. Definition: what queries uncover great targets for your linkable assets?

This framework couldn’t possibly suit every link builders’ style and expertise. I mention it because you’ll see it in some cases below.

Last notes before digging in – I missed getting queries from some great link builders due to time constraints imposed by my late start (apologies to those I missed!). If you want more sample queries from link builders please say so in the comments (and/or add your own) so I can build the case for a follow-up article. And in closing, I’d like to extend a thank you to the SEO Dojo for their warm welcome and link query suggestions.

Link building queries from 21 link builders

Query #1

Ken McGaffin, Keywords and SEO Blogger for Wordtracker Academy:

Here is a mini case-study on our Firefox plug-in ‘SEO Blogger’ which shows how we create linkable assets, queries and approach people for link building.

The link building project

‘SEO Blogger’ Firefox plug in from Wordtracker

At Wordtracker, we wanted to target anyone who published a blog and we were especially interested in business bloggers. We did a reasonable amount of research on the project and it kicked off with doing queries on Google.

We were interesting in identifying sites that had published articles on ‘business blogging’ or advised people how to blog. We identified our prospects using “intitle” queries on Google.

At the last count, this piece of work netted us over 1,000 links in just a few months.

The queries we used were quite simple but they produced an excellent list of target sites.

Here are the queries I used:

• intitle:”business blogging”
• intitle:”business blogs”
• intitle:”blogging tips”

For each query, I’ll look at the first 100 results and then look to compile a list of what I think are the top 50 or so. I concentrate on the top 50 because it’s cost effective. If I get editorial coverage and links from among the top 50, then I know hundreds will follow their example.

You’ve got to have superb content and publicize it through multiple channels. That’s where we put in the bulk of our efforts. For ‘SEO Blogger’ we had a 7-step process:

1. Created a top notch, free plug-in.
2. We created a section on our Academy specifically to offer free blogging articles as well as a blogging download.
3. We also commissioned an e-book from Chris Garrett, “Blogging for Business” that would generate revenue.
4. About 4 days before launch, we contacted our top 50 researched targets, gave them some copy and invited them to be the first to try our new plugin – we asked them to write about it or tweet it if they found it useful. We gave people a strict embargo.
5. We wrote a series of customized press releases that went to the press list we’ve built up over the years. Note that we suggested how to link to us in all our communications.
6. This is the most important step – we responded to questions and queries almost immediately. That meant assigning people to take on that task. I’m convinced our quick responses helped build trust and relationships.
7. Finally, on release, we tweeted about the launch. Many of the bloggers journalists who we had contacted also tweeted at the same time. The results were fantastic – the synergy we got from these multiple channels is always what I’m after.

In summary,  I think you need to have a commitment to create great, free stuff in order to tap into these link targets.

Query #2

Shaun Anderson, of Hobo SEO Company in Scotland.

One of the simplest ways I use to build links for any business is finding colleges and universities who link degree students and alumni to to job opportunities, and promote their student discount partners online. I consider links from very real sites like these as authority building links.

Obviously the first thing to do is get used to publishing your job vacancies and any offers on your site, and then telling potential linking partners about them. TIP: never take these jobs offline either – just mention “Role Filled” and strike out the text.

• Target Asset = Job Vacancy / Internships For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = jobs degree site:.ac.uk, careers opportunities site:.ac.uk, careers advice site:.ac.uk, jobs degree site:.edu, careers degree site:.edu, careers advice site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Another variation of this query occurs with colleges and universities who publish links to sites that offer their alumni special student discounts (so effectively, all you need is a student discount for products or services). This is useful even for small businesses in a very tight catchment area.

• Target Asset = Student Discount For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = student discount partners site:.ac.uk, student discount partners site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Of course, in every case you need to dig around the site in question but offering a student discount to all colleges and universities and building a list of marketing communications offers at unis and colleges and contacting them asking for a link in their newsletter (which many have) in return for a student discount is going to be more rewarding than sending out 1000 unsolicited spam link request emails. TIP – don’t be cheap. The better your offer for students, the better chance you’ll get a link.

Ultimately these kinds of educational links are a win win – they are not hurting either site, and students get a good deal too. If you have good content on your site, you can just go right on and ask them to link to it if they already have a habit of linking out to similar sites to yours, or even send them articles about “How to get a job in {keyword} services” for their careers newsletter or resource section.

Query #3

Eric Ward, content link builder since 1994

Understanding how to use what Google will give you via advanced syntax queries is one of those private strategies where I don’t tell my exact approach, I only sort of hint at it. The specific queries I use are typically client/subject specific.

That said, I could share some vertical/marginally useful ones, say, if the content I am building links for is PBS’ content on volcanoes.

Then, an example target site would be this one.

And, I would have found that target site via a Google query string like this: [volcano learn diagram useful demonstration other links].

Now, this is a beautiful example, and it’s a real example, and it resulted in a topical link obtained, but…most folks who are building links are not doing so on behalf of PBS content about a vertical like “volcanoes”. So, while my example may look nice, and it worked for me because my clients are content creators like PBS, most folks will see my example and crucify me/it as being “unrealistic” for their purposes, since their content is not as “linkworthy” as PBS’s.

Query #4

Wiep Knol, newly of Linkbuilding.nl

Here’s a list of a few queries that I often use or have used in the past to find interesting websites. I left the most obvious ones out, because I assume that most people already know and use these.

Content targeted:

• {keyword} “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
• {keyword} “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
• {keyword} “write for us” OR “write for me”
• {keyword} inurl:category/guest

You can refine these queries by using {keyword location} in stead of {keyword}, or by switching to just {location}.

Resource/ research targeted:

• {keyword} “top * [tools/ articles/ websites/ etc.]” -> refine search to ~1 year ago. Contact anybody who shows up and ask if you can help with the 2009/ 20** edition of the article
• {keyword} research -> see explanation above
• {keyword} {location} resources OR “useful sites” OR links
• {keyword} {USP} intitle:resources -> Use ‘green’, ‘cheapest’ etc as USP
• .edu targeted: {keyword} site:.edu “planned research” OR “upcoming project” -> might return upcoming research/ project/ whatever that can be useful (both for info and for links)

To find specific types of websites:

• {keyword} “Powered by phpBB” OR “powered by vBulletin”
• {keyword} “Blog powered by TypePad” OR “powered by Wordpress”

Additionally, one thing that always works very well for me is asking the client what the most important industry related websites and blogs are, and which ones his or her favorite are. Then I do some searching in the LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers of the client and some of his colleagues, and look for connections with these websites. If I find a match, explain to my client how he can use that connection and turn it into a link. This not only results in links to the client website on highly relevant websites that he likes (=a happy client), but it also makes sure that he is building connections that will be useful in the future as well (= life time value).

Query #5

Ann Smarty, SEO Consultant, SEOSmarty.com

• target asset = new low-calorie chocolate product
• key link prospects = mommy bloggers
• link prospecting queries = [pr welcome], [submit * review], [pr friendly], [pr contact], [pr info], [get * reviewed], [allintitle:get * reviewed], [reviews inurl:submit]

• target asset = a contest by fitness equipment store
• key link prospects = bloggers who cover web contests with a link back to the host
• link prospecting queries = [intitle:submit intitle:contest], [allintitle:submit * contest], [blog contests], [submit * giveaway]

Also from Ann: Link Building Search Queries Collection How to Use Google Wildcard Operator for Link Building and Baiting

Query #6

Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link, link building services and training

We begin all custom campaigns by sending surveys to the client’s customer base, which cuts our prospecting time in half and pinpoints the sites and/or types of businesses we need to look for. From there, it’s a simple matter of doing basic research to match sites with our client’s demographic. I depend less on queries for this and more on tools like Quantcast and Compete. If I do need to query, I use all four engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo and Bing) plus DMOZ, Hoovers, Lexis Nexis and local directories. My goal is to find businesses with street and algorithmic credibility to pitch my promotions and content to.

Query #7

Melanie Nathan, consultant for Canadian SEO

Footprints: A footprint is simply common text than can be searched for thereby revealing all the places that use the same text.

For example, a Google search for [Allowed HTML tags:] will bring back all the sites and blogs that allow you to use custom anchor text when commenting.

If you happen to come across an authoritative site that allows you to automatically post content with dofollow links (for example, a classified ad), take note of the form they’re using as footprints left by the form software are easily trackable and can allow you to find other sites that are using the same form.

Some examples of common footprints:

Dofollow blog comments:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["Notify me of follow-up comments?"+"Submit the word you see below:"]

Result: Over 60,000 new prospects (ie. sites that use the same dofollow form software)

Dofollow classified ads:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC"]

Result: Over 40,000 other sites that use the same dofollow classified ad software.

Take it a step further with “drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC”+health and you’ve narrowed it down to only the sites that mention (for example) health.

Keep in mind that these are just 2 very basic examples. Get creative and you’ll be surprised at what you might uncover.

Disclaimer: I am in NO way suggesting that you spam these types of sites. However, if you’re going to spend the time interacting and engaging with other sites and blogs in your industry (for reals!), I AM suggesting that you maximize your efforts by making sure to interact on sites which will offer the most benefit to your organic goals.

Query #8

Wil Reynolds of the ThinkSeer SEO Agency

• Linkable Asset: A prize (product or service of course ;)
• Link Target: The target is charity web sites where we can give something away and be listed as an in kind donor
• Queries: ["in kind donations" list], ["in kind donors" list]

Query #9

Tom Demers of WordStream, the keyword management software company responsible for The Free Keyword Tool.

A couple of things I’m frequently promoting are videos and free tools or widgets. Here I’ll use some pretty generic queries like:

• target asset = Video Content
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} videos], intitle:[{target keyword} clips]

• target asset = Free tool/widget
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} tools], intitle:[free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of {target keyword} tools]

Then I’ll use SEO for Firefox to export the data and de-dupe and triage the link prospects based on PageRank.

Beyond just pulling down places linking out, you can also identify a few sites that are on multiple lists. From there, pull down their backlink profiles and sort by page rank (using SEO for Firefox) or find sites that are linking to them multiple times using the Hostname Occurrence Counter. At the end of the process I usually have a nice list of potential link profiles.

Query #10

Gab Goldenberg of SEORoi.com

For queries,  I try to find less commercial sites based on insider jargon, insider topics or thinking about communities. So if you are kindergarten related, I’d look up jargon related to parenting or issues like whether you should carry your kid in a sling or if strollers are better. This works better for B2C than B2B, since I can’t see professionals being up for selling links on their sites, vs the general public. I could be wrong though.

For prospects, I target bloggers, members of the said communities.

Building links to B2C sites that can have a related community. It’s harder when you’re selling stuff like toothpaste or ordinary drugstore items without associated communities.

The upside to this is that if you have the budget, you can saturate the key sites in the community with these paid links and build a brand. In which case, you can thumb your nose at Google because you’ll eventually build direct traffic as a key source as well as referral traffic, reduce their ability to penalize you, etc. I wrote somewhere about my friend Rachel who surfs Wikipedia for entertainment. That’s where you want to get to. Where people bypass Google to get to you directly. It’s ironic, but the best SEO will get you to the point you don’t need search traffic any more.

Check out Gab’s 101-tip guide to buying text links.

Query #11

Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures link building service.

Here are a few for you that I have saved in a our database of queries we use for link building:

• “keyword phrase” sponsor charity
• “public library” “useful links” keyword phrase site:.gov
• “useful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “helpful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “favorite keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “best keyword phrase” site:.edu OR site:.org
• keyword phrase resources public library site:.us
• keyword phrase site:.edu

Query #12

Members of the Huomah SEO Dojo, SEO Training for Search Warriors.

Many thanks to the fine community at the SEO Dojo for their contributions to this article!

member: fedem of http://www.buyandwalk.com/

• linkdomain:competitor1.com; linkdomain:competitor2.com; -linkdomain:mysite.com

This will give you a landscape of which sites are linking to 2 or 3 of your competitors but not your site. This increase the chances of finding partners willing to link to your site.

Query #13

Ken Lyons of WordStream.

I use search operators to find personal email addresses for link outreach. some of my favorites:

• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + email
• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + contact
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + email
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + contact

From 12 Ways to Find Anyone’s Personal Email Address

Query #14

Craig Parker of Soula.com

Social Media Based queries are obviously useful for commenting and scoping out competition so: site:{SN} {keyword}

Where SN (social network) is digg.com, delicious.com or twitter.com etc. and {keyword} is one of your keywords or brands/competitor brands.

The other one I find quite useful is narrowing down themed directories so:

• {keyword} + “add a site”
• {keyword} + “submit url”

Obviously there are literally loads of combinations of these utilizing different words for directory i.e. “suggest url” or “submit listing”

You can also combine it with the intitle or inurl command for extra fun! Again throw in different words for directory like “list” and you can make lots of combinations on this.

• {keyword} + “intitle:directory”
• {keyword} + “inurl:directory”

They are basic ones but can be often overlooked by those not used to this stuff.

Query #15

Jon Santillan of SEO Dubai

I used search operators to find potential links for my link building campaign using footprinted Scripts. This varies from directory, blog commenting, forum, social media directories and competitors.

• Target Asset = Red Widget
• Strategy – A combination of standard text or content that usually can see in a website
• Ex: Directory = inurl:submit.php intext:Powered by “Directory Name” intext: red widget
• Blog Commenting = intext:red widget intext:blog comments powered by “Comment Plugin”
• Social Media = intext:”Submit A New Story” intitle:Register intext: “Name of Social Media Script”
• Forum = inurl:forum intext:red widget

My favorite: Competitors Footprints. Following competitors Backlinks is the most exciting one, you can use link:competitorsdomain.com and check a potential link partner. By following competitors footprints, you can sometimes see the strategy of their link building, for example, if they are using Directory, Blog Commenting, Social Media or Forum. If by any chance you got the name of a Directory Script, Social media script, plug commenting plugin that is not in your list, you can add that in your arsenal.

Once you have figured out the competitors pattern how they are building their backlinks plus your link building strategy I think that will be easier for you.

In my opinion, combining different search operators and website content pattern is one of most effective link building strategy you just need to be more creative to combine and try different combination.

Query #16

Navin Poeran

I’m using advanced queries in combination with Google alerts, to receive mails, whenever there is somewhere i can drop a link.

I just create a new alert with: OR -mysite.com inurl:links

Query #17

Andy Murd of MMMeeja.

I use this query in Google Image Search to find the little “U Comment – I Follow” logo:

• “MY KEYPHRASE” inurl:ifollow*.gif

For deep links to your blog posts, you can add “CommentLuv Enabled” to find the popular Wordpress plugin.

I make RSS feeds from link-building searches so my feed reader nags me to post a few comments per day.

Query #18

David Harry (The Gypsy) of the Huomah SEO Blog

When reverse engineering link profiles, we use stuff like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com site:.com "SEO Blog"]
• linkdomain: – searches for links to Huomah.com
• Site; – tells it to look for results from ‘.com’ extensions.
• “SEO Blog” searches the KWs on the page (or hopefully in the anchor text)

Or

• [linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "keyword"]
• [linkdomain:example.com site:.gov " keyword"]

Or maybe if we’re looking for relevant pages, we can track the TITLE

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:SEO]

Page URLs are strong also, so we might do something like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com inurl:"search engine optimization"]

We also can use a variety of low level link trolling with dorks related to:

• [add-links, last-updated 2000 inurl:.edu]

Query #19

Julie Joyce, of the link development firm Link Fish Media

“You can find particularly interesting sites geared towards a very specific interest, by using an organic thought process in which you have no major agenda. This all sounds very New Age but it has led us to some of our best inbound links.

I’ll give you an example for this one, since it’s the only method that isn’t exactly what it sounds like. When working for a site that sells punk rock concert videos, we may search for “punk videos” to start with, then we’ll see a long-tailed search phrase somewhere down in the SERPs on page 3, so we’ll then type that phrase in, then click on the first result, see something on the site’s homepage that triggers an idea, and we’ll end up on a fan site that is devoted to the music of Stiff Little Fingers.

We see that this site seeks to list all online stores that happen to sell Stiff Little Fingers items, and our client has one of these sites. Therefore, it’s a great place to get a link, and it was a somewhat random method of discovery. It’s also relevant but we still go about it in a slightly more haphazard way.”

Excerpted from: 6 Discovery Methods For Finding Ideal Linking Partners

Query #20

Brian Gilley of SocialSEO.com

Drupal Powered Websites (most allow comments links and/or dofollow)

Targeting Drupal sites with the keyword phrase “home mortgages” with comments turned on and that allow HTML links to be added and are almost always followed.

Want to get more specific and search for the keyword in the title. Try the “intitle:” search operator on for size.

Want to get freaky with it and go the broad route and not including Drupal websites or any specific CMS platform? Just search for sites allowing the HTML tag, which usually means a followed link and brings up endless possibilities.

See more tips from Mr. Gilley on how to find backlinks with search queries.

Query #21

Brian Chappell, Search/Social Marketer

Finding people who will want to share your content (…including linking to it…) can be much simpler if you know how to search quickly through the major social networks.

• Linkedin: [site:linkedin.com inurl:in “social media expert”]
• Bebo: [site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo “social media expert”]
• CafeMom: [site:www.cafemom.com inurl:cafemom.com/home/ “stay at home mom”]
• Facebook: [site:facebook.com/people “led zeppelin”]
• Flickr: [site:flickr.com/people “@gmail”]
• Twitter: [site:twitter.com -inurl:statuses -inurl:status “social media expert”]
• MySpace: [site:profile.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction “go to nc state”]
• YouTube: [site:youtube.com/user “social media expert”]

From: How to Target Users within Social Networks

Additional link query resources:

Two Link Prospecting Query building tools:

• SEOBook Link Suggest Tool
• Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

10 Articles on Advanced Queries for Link Building

1. Long List of Link Searches
2. Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities
3. 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
4. Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks
5. The Power of Search Queries for Link Building: The Basics and Beyond Part 2
6. Link Building Tip: Easily Find DoFollow Blogs Search String
7. Search Engine Query Cheat Sheets
8. Google Hacks for Dorks and SEO prowlers
9. Getting Links From Known, Quality Linkers
10. Eric Ward Queries from Print Search Marketing Standard Interview