Guest Posting Done Right
Guest Posting for SEO
While no SEO technique is ideal, guest posting is perhaps the most reliable and useful tool for building links that is available to marketers today.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, guest posting simply involves creating links to your website from external blogs and sites by providing them with free content. You write a post or article for a blog or a website and then send it to them and let them publish it on the agreement that you can include a link to your own website in it.
As a result, they get free content and you get a link back to your site. Everyone wins…
But as with any tool, it’s all about how you use it…
Tip 1: Not Too Much
The first vital tip to keep in mind is that you just mustn’t overdo guest posting – like any other SEO strategy, a good links profile is one that appears ‘natural’ and therefore you don’t need an excessive amount of any similar ‘type’ of links. Use guest posts and additional alternative methods to create your link profile in a broader strategy.
Tip 2: Choose Authority Blogs
Probably the most important factor to consider when getting guest posts is the type of blog that your link is going to end up on. The best option is to get your links on authority blogs and sites.
Authority blogs and sites are those that Google trusts as an authority already and these will thus be able to act much more effectively as useful ‘testimonies’ as to the quality of your site.
One excellent way to find high authority blogs is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. This will show you sites that Google trusts enough to feature reporting on breaking news. If you can get a link from one of these, it can help you a great deal.
Another tip is to look at the links profile of the blog you’re planning on submitting content to. Trust for Google works a little like ‘degrees of separation’ and if the blog linking to you has a link from a .edu site, or high authority site, for example, then this can result in more trust for you too!
Tip 3: Excellent Content
The post you write is highly important. It needs to be high quality, not only so that it sends more of the right message to Google, but also to encourage other high authority blogs to want to link to you (it’s also important to ensure your branding is strong for the same reason).
At the same time, you need to write high quality content that is directly related to the topic of your website. This is important because you want to communicate the topic of your blog to Google and make the links more relevant. Google insists that all in-bound links be highly relevant. What’s better than having a your link embedded into a post that you wrote?
