All posts by Pak Hou Cheung

Creative Link Building, Link Prospecting or even Link Scouting – call it what you will, the premise is the same:  you are looking for opportunities to build links.

Over the years there have been many different ways that people have been doing this; one of my personal favourites is using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. However useful this is, I still find it time consuming and painful, until thankfully along came Linkdex which came and helped ease the pain.

5::365 - Revisiting

However helpful these tools have been in aiding my link building efforts, it is important as part of any SEO link strategy to think outside the box and establish links where your competitors are not present.

Like many others I am sure, I find quality link prospecting to be a slow process, and knowing where to begin is the hardest and most frustrating.  Hopefully, though, after reading this you’ll be able to analyse quicker and build better quality links.

My Foursquare Experience so far…

Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below.  I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

 

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”.  Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now).  In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

 

 

To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.

Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.

 

6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries

These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:

Query What does it mean?
“best practice seo”  Searches for this exact phrase within “”
mobile -phone  Inclusion of – means searches for the word mobile but nothing following after phone
seo ~glossary  Brings up a glossary of information regarding that word
define:seo  Definition of that word or phrase
OR / |  Returns search queries with one of the given terms
related:  Helps list web pages related to the URL

Let’s get one thing straight first:  you will NOT be required to do the following in order to get free followers on Twitter using this method:

  1. Tweet interesting thoughts
  2. Post ground breaking news articles
  3. Be informative to your target market
  4. Interact with people
  5. Be selling a good/service to people in order to be followed

Over the past few years, as social media marketing has increased and become ever more popular, ludicrous businesses have popped up “selling” Twitter followers, with many brands also reporting the success of their social media campaigns simply from the number of increased followers.

Today’s post will not only show you how to get free followers, but also help you understand that having 100 followers as opposed to 100,000 makes no difference; it’s about quality not quantity (funnily enough, similar to SEO).