Google Hacking
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Google Hacking is not a bad thing, but I thought I should cover a little bit of it. Seems there are a lot of people in some of the forums I frequent who do not know about some of the ways you can structure your queries to get more useful information. I would think the first thing internet marketers would do is to learn how to dig into the web. Without this information then you are going to be destined to trying to succeed and you may do okay, but you are not going to be able to do as well as you could nor or you going to be able to truly innovate in your IM business.
I don’t know how many eBooks I have purchased on generating traffic to your websites and most mention either article writing or social networking or other type methods for generating traffic you your site and getting listed in the search engines. These are important tasks and I recommend you do them, but do them with a purpose and with the knowledge you need about your niche. To get that knowledge then we can use Google Hacking. Google hacking is not about hacking into Google’s database and gaining access to their code ( of course that would be very useful and lucrative, but it would get you put in jail before you could capitalize on your information), but rather some interesting use of search engine features to find out more information about your niche and potential linking partners than you may be able to find with just a standard search.
Lets think about this a little. Everyone should know you can use the site: http://WhatEverSite.com to find out how many pages Google has indexed on a particular domain( well if you did not then you do now) and you should know you can use link:http://WhatEverSite.com to find out how many incoming links you have to a site, but there are some more uses for this sort of search query.
You have probably heard that links form educational institutions are useful in helping your site’s ranking, but how do you find places on these sites to get a link. Maybe you have a friend that works at one of the colleges that can get you a link, but probably not. You don’t really need to know anyone, just a couple of Google commands that you already know. Now we all know that comments on blogs are not as useful as they once where, but they still will cause a SE to find your site. Lets say we have a site on the Dog Training Niche and we want a link to our site from a .edu site. How can we find one. Well lets use this as our search term “dog training†site:edu +blog This search returned 1600+ sites that are of a type blog and have the term dog training in the blog and they are all on a .edu domain. So now I have a list of blogs which I could possibly post some comments to with a link back to my site. Now comments are not as useful as they once where for the SE’s, but one on a .edu site has to be better than one on your run of the mill .com site. Plus since these types of sites are considered more authoritive by the SE’s you will likely gain a decent backlink with just a little effort. I caution against spamming the .edu sites with spam since one it does not help the site and will probably get deleted, but if you post some useful content on the blog post then your link will likely stay forever. I’ve used this technique to get new site crawled and listed in the SE’s within a couple of days. I can’t guarantee you the same results, but if done properly this works and as a side bonus since these type of sites tend to rank better, they chances are that you will garner some additional visitors from this link. Afterall that is the real benefit of links to have multiple routes into your sites that are not dependant upon SE rankings.
I will continue this series as time goes along and provide some other useful search methods to drill searches down in other areas of you Niche and how to get a better insight into what your Niche visitors want, then you will be able to figure out how to give it to them.
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