Guest blogging is one of the keys to increase a website presence and gain reputation from its target audience online. It is also the best way to acquire inbound links to a website. Guest blogging has become the main way of many SEOs and bloggers to get public attention of people within their industry. However, not all guest bloggers can succeed in this technique as there are few important factors to look at when guest posting.
- Contribute on high traffic websites – Choose high traffic websites whenever you look for guest blogging opportunities. It is important to make sure that the amount of possible readers that would visit and read your post is much higher than your regular visitors coming in to your website in a regular basis. Since you are on your way to expanding your online presence, you must hunt for top websites in your industry. Also, top websites are quite strict when it comes to publishing content of other people on their website to maintain the quality of each posts being published on their website.
- Look for high DA and PR websites – Websites with high domain authority and page rank are likely to rank well in search engines. Also, they have already established online presence and online trust of their target audience. If you get a chance of continuously contributing content for their website, the chances that your website will benefit from their DA and PR will become higher. Some guest bloggers tend to do one guest post only on a website and move to another website to inquire for guest blogging opportunity. In my point of view, this is definitely the same as “drop and forget” comment on a blog post. If you really are serious in getting the attention of people within your niche, it is required that you do contribute on a website in a regular basis rather than in 10 websites.
- Analyze the website update frequency – Analyze the guest posts on your target website. If the website is populated by guest authors, think of a content that you can provide to make sure that your content will
- Pay attention to social media attention – Social media attention of each post is definitely important in SEO nowadays. Social media signals tell search engines how awesome your content is and how your content is helping your target readers. If your guest post receive a lot of social media love from different real people, your content may have a chance to get promoted in a larger community within your niche.
- Choose the right website – Relevancy is the most important factor that we need to look at in SEO. If you are planning to guest post on different websites, it is recommended that you should contact the websites that are closely related to yours or even the topics of their website. Google is very strict when it comes to relevancy and you should follow their guidelines when linking to other websites to avoid having your website penalized.
- Be careful with your bio – Author’s bio is the section where we introduce ourselves as the writer of awesome articles that we contribute on a website. Make sure that you don’t use exact match anchor text in the bio as it may be hit by Google algorithms when they rolls out another update. Also, make sure that your author’s bio with links will look and sound natural to avoid the risks associated with the bio and blog post.
Guest posting is becoming popular in 2013 since the competition in SEO has become very complex. It’s not about quantity of links that matter; it’s about quality of content and how you acquire your links. If you don’t carefully pay attention on the given tips above and you randomly contributed on different websites, you might not only fail in guest blogging, you might also lost the reputation of your website and rankings in SERPs.