These days one can hardly find an entrepreneur who would be unaware of the importance of search engine optimization for long-term success in business. However, many business owners still believe that SEO is all about keywords and paid AdWords. These, of course, constitute a huge portion of what SEO is, but there is plenty more a determined entrepreneur has to consider. One method that gains greater and greater traction over the last few years is guest posting. Although Matt Cutts, Google’s former head of Web Spam division, declared its death as far back as 2014, it seems that guest posting has only gained in popularity since then. But what exactly should you do to boost SEO with its help? Whether you use a blog posting service or run your own campaigns, the following tips will certainly be of use.
Check domain authority and relevancy of host blogs
The difference between guest posting now and what it used to be, say, ten years ago, is that today quality trumps quantity every time. Back then, it did not matter what and where you posted – the more the better, and quality is damned. These days, scattering dozens of poorly written posts across low-authority blogs will not just fail to improve your rankings, but is also more likely to get you penalized.
Therefore, before you pitch your post to a blog owner, check its domain authority and make sure its audience is relevant for your business. If you sell power drills, writing a post for a cooking blog is probably not the best way to invest your time.
If you use the services of a guest blogging agency, you will not have to think about such things; otherwise, you will have to run thorough background checks on every blog you choose to work with.
Include shareable content
If you want a guest post to bring you traffic and shares across social media, make your content shareable. Original guides, instructions, tips or, as suggested by guest posting service Luckyposting.com, beautifully designed infographics based on original research are especially prone to be shared and referred to.
Combine follow and no-follow links
Before pitching your post idea to the editor, check the host blog’s policy regarding backlinks. While follow links are the bread and butter of SEO-oriented guest posting, as they directly improve your search engine ranking, no-follow links can be useful as well. If placed in relevant blogs, they bring you valuable organic traffic and expose your website to new audiences – moreover, a healthy backlink profile requires both follow and no-follow links, so do not dismiss blogs that only accept the latter.
Pitch to multiple blogs at the same time
Once you start your first guest blogging campaign, you will soon realize that it is not a fast process. Even if the webmaster accepts your blog idea (which is not a given), it may take weeks for you to arrange all the details, write the post, make corrections based on the webmaster’s requirements and so on. Posting your article is unlikely to be the blog owner’s first priority. So why not use this time to pitch ideas (or the same idea) to a few other blogs? This way your campaign will be moving forward even if your post pitches get rejected nine times out of ten.
When all is said and done, there is one important thing you should understand – guest posting can influence your SEO only after prolonged and consistent efforts. You will not increase your ranking after posting a single article. Be prepared to write at least five posts per month to see any results at all – and if you want these results to be significant, you should apply even greater effort.