Posted by BlueSEO on February 17th, 2010

One of the most difficult tasks in any SEO campaign is finding niche-specific pages that are not only relevant, but pass link equity back to the web property you are optimizing. While competitive analysis may turn up some diamonds in the rough, it is very difficult to get the quantity and quality of links you are looking for through that tactic alone.

Since buying links can put your site in the sandbox and it’s not easy to garner any tangible results through link baiting, it is essential to “search outside the box” in order to turn up backlinks of value. This is where link building queries come in. Link building queries are essentially search queries (ie searches in Google) that tell the SE’s what type of sites you would like to turn up in the results. By using effective link building queries, an SEO can not only save countless hours of time but can turn up the exact type of sites they are looking to build links on.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz created an extremely thorough list of link building queries that can be used in any niche to find specific types of links. I especially like how he goes into queries for finding specific types of links such as directories, blogs, etc. Anne Smarty, a guest writer for Search Engine Journal put together a more simplified list of link building queries that give any link builder a good place to start. If you want to get a more real world approach on using these tactics, refer to this list of advanced link building queries from 21 link building experts.

There are also several tools out there that help you find the best link queries for a particular keyword or type of search. The most effective and easy to use tools I have found are Ontolo’s tool, which gives you some advanced options and Solo SEO’s tool.

Now that you have the resources and the tools on advanced link building queries, get out there and see what you can dig up!