Link prospecting is a necessary part of a link building campaign. It’s essentially the first step, a huge step, in starting your link building process. So, it’s important that you go into this step with the knowledge needed to be successful in your research.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to link prospecting is making sure the sites you find are relevant. Relevancy is a crucial factor in building quality links. With user experience being so important, you want to make sure that the site you’re trying to be linked on makes sense and that it’s related to your industry or niche.

One way to help collect relevant sites is to use search modifiers. These modifiers combined with your target keywords, are a powerful tool when conducting your link prospecting for relevant sites.

So here’s the list of the top 10 search modifiers to assist in your research.

1. Site:.gov (or whichever domain extension you’d like to target) – this helps narrow down your search to show only your chosen domain extension.
2. Inurl:keyword – this will tell Google to pull sites that only have the keyword in the URL. This also means that the keyword will be in the title of the page as well.
3. Intitle:keyword – this will show sites with your keyword in the title.
4. Intext:keyword – this will show sites that include your keyword within the text of the site page.
5. Related:site.com – this will show sites related to that address.
6. “Query” – Putting your query in quotations will ensure that you search for that exact phrase in the same order that it is written.
7. –Query – Using the minus sign will help remove sites that you don’t want to show up in your results.
8. Keywords AND keywords – Using AND ensures that both keywords appear in each result.
*tip: be sure to capitalize AND otherwise it won’t be recognized as a modifier
9. Keywords OR keywords – Searches for multiple items.
*note: the vertical bar (|) can also be used to represent OR
10. ~keyword: the ~ symbol will show synonyms of that keyword.

There you have it, the top 10 search modifiers for successful research- happy prospecting!