While no SEO technique is perfect, guest posting is perhaps the most reliable and useful tool for building a links profile 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 proviso that you can include a link to your own website in the article.
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…
Don’t Overdo It
The first important tip to keep in mind is that you mustn’t overdo guest posting – as with any other SEO strategy. A good links profile is one that seems natural and thus you don’t want there to be an overabundance of any one particular ‘type’ of link. Use guest posts but also use other methods and make this a part of a broader strategy.
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. And in that regard, the best option by far 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, then you can be sure that they will help you a great deal.
Another tip is to look at the links profile of the blog you’re planning on targeting. Trust for Google works a little like degrees of separation, and if the blog linking to you has a link from a .edu site for example, then this will translate to more trust for you too!
Find Guest Posting Opportunities In Your Niche
Another great way to find blogs in your niche that accept guest posts is to simply search Google for “guest posting dogs” or “guest posting cars” or “guest posting mommy blogs”, assuming your expertise is in the dog or car niche, or a niche related to mom bloggers. You’ll want to find the most authoritative of these blogs and examine their requirements for guest posting.
Write Excellent Content
The post you write is also highly important. This needs to be high quality, not only so that it sends more of the right signals to Google. but also to encourage other high caliber 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 excellent quality content that is directly relevant to the topic of both your website, and the site hosting your content. This is important because it will help to communicate the topic of your blog to Google and will make the link more relevant. Google demands that all in-bound links be highly relevant at all times. What’s better than having a link embedded naturally into a post that you wrote?
