Google offers a wide range of searches, some of which are very powerful and useful for SEO searches. Here are some of my favourites;

intitle:keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in the title. You can add more than one keyword using the syntax intitle:keyword1 keyword2 but this won’t actually match both keywords to the title and will display results that include keyword1 in the title and keyword2 in the title, body text or incoming link text. If you want to match both keywords in the title, you will need to use the following search modifier.

allintitle:keyword

Displays results that have all of the keywords in the title. Good for multiple keyword searches

inurl:keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in their urls.

allinurl:keyword

Displays pages that have all the keywords in their titles. Works in the same way of allintitle so that its good for multiple keyword searches.

inanchor: keyword

Displays pages that have the keyword in text links pointing to the page

keyword site:www.domain.com

Displays pages on www.domain.com that include the keyword in the page title, body text or incoming link text.

related:www.domain.com

Displays pages that are related to www.domain.com through topic or context.

link:www.artsgraphica.com

This should return pages that link to domain.com but the results are often limited and inaccurate. I don’t know for sure but I assume this search has been disabled by Google to stop it being abused for SEO purposes.

So why does this all matter to SEO?

Well thinking about this if you want to find sites that are optimizing for a particular keyword then a good place to start might be intitle: keyword as all smart SEOs know that the meta title is important for rankings. The same also goes for inanchor: keyword as we all know that incoming link text is another important ranking metric. Now if you could combine searches like this with a keyword then you can find some quite interesting results. Here are some examples of some useful SEO searches

keyword + “intitle:directory”
keyword + “intitle:submit”
keyword + “intitle:add”
keyword + “submit site”
keyword + “submit url”
keyword + “intitle:links”
keyword + “intitle:resources”
keyword + “inurl:list”
keyword + “suggest url”
keyword + “suggest a url”
keyword + “add listing”
keyword + “submit your website”

Hopefully this should give you some good ideas on how you can use specialist searches to help finding potential links within your topic area.