Everyone knows that today, SEO and getting good rankings is all about back links, and what those links say about you – i.e what link text (anchor text) is used when linking back to your site.

How many you have will determine how well your site ranks for a given keyword or keyword phrase. But the truth is that there are a number of other factors you’ll need to look at when doing optimization of your next linking campaign.

When doing SEO for your own sites or those of your SEO clients, it really helps to know some of the rather cool tricks that Search Engines like Google give you in order for you to do SEO competitive research on your own sites or those of your rivals.

So today I wanted to share some truly useful Google’s link commands (these work in Yahoo! as well) that anyone can use for SEO research in order to check on the search engine optimization and performance of your website(s) and that of your competitor’s websites as well.

Using these special commands in the Google search menu is really very simple and a huge time saver as well. To use these special link commands, just type the command into the Google’s search box. Google link commands always appear like this when you type them into the search box – “command:query”

Well let’s get started so here you go, have fun!

link: YourWebsite.com – Shows other pages that link TO your URL. (You can put your competitors in here as well 😉

related: YourWebsite.com – Shows other related websites Google has in its index, that they think are related to this URL.

site: YourWebsite.com – Restricts search to this domain only – Displays all the pages Google has currently in it’s index of YOUR site.

allinurl: Keyword Term – shows only pages with the keyword term in the URL

inURL: Keyword Term – Like allinurl but only for the next query word

allintitle: Keyword Term – Shows only results with the keyword term in title

allintext: Keyword – Searches within text of pages only, but not in the links or page title.

allinlinks: Keyword – queries only within links, not text or title

cache: YourWebsite.com – Shows the Google cache information for that web page

info: YourWebsite.com – Displays links to related searches, back links and pages containing the URL (similar to as typing the URL into the search box)

Here are some lesser know commands that aren’t associated to search engine optimization, but we have found them to be pretty convenient as a short cut when doing your SEO research or just for fun.

spell: Keyword – Google will check your spelling

stocks: Symbol – Google will look up the stock index

phone numbers – Enter a query string that looks like a phone number and have the name and address displayed

Want more SEO and Google hacks, tricks and SEO tips to help you quickly grow your business online? It’s easy to stay up to date with what’s going on in the world of SEO. Just visit http://www.mastersitemanager.com and check out our blog, or join our newsletter.

Author Bio: Don Schnure founded 1AutomationWiz.com, an all in one ecommerce and marketing software. He’s also a raving fan about this SEO monitoring software

Category: Marketing
Keywords: link commands, google, master site manager, SEO, search engine optimization