If you want to increase the visibility of your website and to help increase your position in the SERPs then there are many ways to do this and you will likely be struggling to know which method is likely to bring you the most success. This is particularly pertinent as many of the methods that we are sold can in fact be ineffectual and end up causing us to get penalized by Google. Here though we will look at one very good strategy that you can use currently to build your reputation and increase your position in Google, which is ‘guest blogging’.
What is Guest Blogging and Why Should it Interest Me?
Guest blogging essentially means posting on other people’s blogs. Here you find a blog or a website that you like and that you think is somewhat similar to your own (but hopefully has a little more prominence) and then you offer to write them an article in response to a link back to your site. They publish your piece, and at the bottom you will get a little author bio that will include a link back to your website.
Normally when you think about ‘link building’ this will mean submitting articles to content farms and sites like E-Zine articles, or it will mean submitting them to link directories that no one reads. On the other hand with guest blogging you have a chance to get your links onto some genuinely really good websites that can not only help increase your page rank, but also help to bring you organic visitors and massively increase your reputation.
How to Find Sites
The first challenge with this however is how you actually find the sites that are willing to publish your posts in exchange for a link. This is actually often easier than you might think however and if your content is genuinely good, and your site will offer value to the readers of the blog you are targeting, then you might be surprised to find that these blog owners are guys just like you who are willing and able to help you out.
To find the right sites to approach you should simply message a few of the sites you currently read yourself. At the same time you can try searching your niche (e.g. ‘bodybuilding’) and a phrase that indicates they are looking for guest posts, e.g.: ‘bodybuilding submit your article’, or ‘bodybuilding guest poster’.
Another great strategy is to see what your competition is doing. One way you can do that is by using the technique called ‘follow that blogger’ in which you simply find a guest blogger who is posting on the same subject as you, and then just search for all the different blogs that they have already posted on. No doubt these blogs are accepting guest posts in your niche and will thus be highly likely to accept yours. You can also just search for all the inbound links on another site and just see if any of those were obtained through guest blogging.
Some Tips for Successful Guest Blogging
Being successful though means not just finding the blogs, but actually getting accepted. Here are some tips to help you do just that:
• Mimic their editorial style – this is important to ensure that your content fits with the content of their blog, and that their readers will enjoy what you make for them. This means ensuring that you use the same style of punctuation, avoid 1st person narrative if they do, and generally mimic them as closely as possible. They may have a page of editorial guidelines which it will pay you to look at.
• Research the article well – meanwhile you of course need to just make sure that your article is good. Don’t give them your leftovers, give them articles that it hurts you to part with.
• Be a more complete partner – don’t just offer them an article, but state that you’d like to work with them, and make sure you at least mention their site on your site as an inspiration.
• Make your site good – when someone includes a guest post of yours with a link they are putting that link on their front page in most cases. It’s important then to make sure that your site is one that they are willing to recommend, so ensure that it’s professional and that you offer value to their visitors.
Jennifer Wilson is aspiring writer and blogger who also works with SEO hosting as writer. Work experience at Host SEO has helped her improve writing skills drastically.
Guest blogging is indeed important as it allows people to get the crucial backlinks and references that they need for getting good ranks for their website. I must admit that the blog has been written very well.
Great work Jennifer. You have really introduced the subject to the readers very well. At the same time the indepth discussion about ‘how to find sites’ is very useful.
One has to agree that this method (guest blogging) is becoming more and more popular as it pays well in getting backlinks. However, it is important to find suitable site for this purpose.
I can pretty much predict that Google is already on to this type of backlinking. For this reason I no longer accept guest posting on this blog, as it might be considered an unnatural way of link-building so should be done in moderation. But like what I’ve written in a previous blog post, the algorithm is flawed. Because surely it is ethical, to exchange content for link promotion? The idea is still to promote someone’s website through yours. Nofollow should actually be a default setting at this point, because the current default is dofollow, and many site owners don’t do code so how are they supposed to know the difference?