If you’ve ever heard the term “Guest Posts” and need to have a better understanding of what it means and entails, then you are in the right place. We will be taking a deep dive into the subject of Guest Posts or Guest Posting with a view to looking at its different aspects and how important it is in today’s digital marketing and promotions field. At the end of this article, you will have a deeper understanding of this practice and how it can be deployed to help you achieve your online marketing strategies. You shall also understand how to go about publishing guest posts that will be effective.
This practice describes a situation where an individual writes an article which is then published on a blog or website that they do not own. You must have heard the term; “Content is King” or a variation of it. This is true, especially when it’s great content. The idea of guest posting was designed as a symbiotic relationship between a blogger or website owner who constantly needs good quality content and a writer who needs exposure on a larger platform. The writer provides the webmaster with the much needed content and the website gives credit to the writer.
This strategy has since evolved to become both a business and a marketing tool. Websites that score high in the following rating metrics: DA (Domain Authority), DR (Domain Rating), CF (Citation Flow), and TF (Trust Flow) are the best.
Some of these websites maintain a tough editorial process that ensures they only receive posts that are top quality. Thus, offer relevant and highly sought-after information to their readers. Others simply sell a piece of this high-value real estate to writers who can pay to have their articles (guest posts) published. We’ve just described the basic concept behind guest posting. In the next section, we will provide additional information that will provide greater clarity on the subject.
To explain why the practice of guest posting is important, we will need to look at it from two perspectives – Personal Brand Building and Search Engine Optimization.
Writers who want to build their reputation as writers look out for opportunities to publish their work on reputable and high-ranking websites. This gives their work, and by extension, themselves greater exposure. Bearing in mind the premise above, this is a win-win situation for both the writer and the website owner.
The writer supplies the website with the much needed content while the already established website provides the writer with increased exposure. This was one of the original uses of guest posting. It’s basically a rollover from the offline days of newspapers and magazine publishing. While this is still a reason for guest posting, it is not as common as it previously was. Even folks who want this exposure through guest posting achieve it using SEO.
In today’s world, this is the main reason why many folks engage in guest posting. This being the case, we will dissect the use of guest posting as an SEO tool. In the very recent past, many writers sought recognition and career boosts by having their work published on certain websites. Because these are highly rated platforms, having one's work published there automatically tells people that you must be a good writer. This principle still remains the same for SEO. The only difference is that while in the former case, you wanted to impress people, with SEO, you want to impress search engine bots. Search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc., have special algorithms that help them rank websites.
To be relevant to their search audiences, these search engines need to provide useful information for every query triggered by a search. To determine whether or not a website can indeed offer relevant and useful information for a given keyword, the bots look for a number of things. One of the important things that these bots look for is the number of links pointing to a given website. These are known as backlinks. Building backlinks for SEO has become the main reason why the majority of people use guest posts today. If you wish to make any serious progress with your SEO campaigns, then you need to understand how to build backlinks using guest posts.
Since we have established that most people today engage in guest posting for the purpose of backlinking for SEO, it is important that we take some time to explain the basics of SEO and how backlinks fit into the picture.
This is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It describes strategies, actions, and steps that a webmaster or SEO specialist will take to ensure that a website and its various pages rank high on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). When you carry out a search on your favorite search engine, you type in words, also known as keywords.
Using the keyword you typed in the search box, the search engine goes through its database of indexed web pages. This is to find the page or pages that it considers most relevant. Thus, it is likely to supply the information you are searching for. Remember that the search engine does not own this information. It simply indexes, categorizes, and presents them based on a hierarchy determined by its algorithm. The strategies employed to ensure that a given website will be chosen by this algorithm for a given keyword and placed high up in the hierarchy can be broken into two legs. These are on-site and off-site SEO strategies.
We will not be dwelling on these strategies because that is not our focus in this article. One strategy that we will however mention and expound on is link building.
This strategy plays a role in both on-site and off-site SEO. On-site link building involves inter-linking inner pages while off-site link building is what we already described above and our focus in this article. To determine that a website can indeed offer the information sought by the searcher, the search bots look for other websites that are linking to the website. If the number of websites linking to a given website is impressive, the bots assume that they are linking to it because it offers something of value for the given keyword.
If the websites linking or pointing to this other website are authority websites with high DA, DR etc., then the search bots rank this other website even higher. This is therefore the goal of any link-building campaign. While it is possible to get a webmaster to simply insert a link in an existing article, on their website, a more effective way is to guest post and include your link in the post. The guest post will have content relevant to your website’s niche, increasing the value of the link.
Now that we have a basic understanding of what we mean by guest posting and one of its main purposes; link building, let’s quickly discuss how to implement this strategy efficiently.
This is one of the most important aspects of guest posting. You want to be sure that the website or blog you are posting to will offer you the kind of brand exposure you are looking for. Note that, the more reputable the blog is, the more difficult it will be for you to get published on it. Look at different blogs with varying DA and DR ratings. While these blogs with higher ratings will have more backlink power, you can compensate by spreading out and getting links from more blogs even if their ratings are lower. You should however note that link farming can cost you.
Before choosing a blog, look through its existing content to be sure that it is presentable and does not engage in link spamming. A webpage with too many outgoing links loses value. In fact, it is possible to be penalized by search engines because of the websites linking to yours.
Once you have identified blogs that you want to guest post on, look through their content to get an idea of their writing style and general post quality. This will give you an idea of the kind of content to create that will be easily accepted. Bear in mind that these websites need content and will be inclined to accept well-written articles. Make sure that you do proper keyword research so you can link back to your website using the keyword(s) you want to rank for.
Truth be said, this whole thing can really be tasking and even confusing. Thereby, making it difficult for many to go through the process successfully. For people like these, their best bet is outsourcing the entire project to professionals. You should choose an advanced guest posting company that understands how it’s done.
Whether it’s just for brand publicity or link building, they will be able to do a better job than you may be able to do. You stand a better chance of having your guest posts published with these companies. Many of them already have relationships with reputable blogs where they can quickly publish relevant articles. This saves time and gets you started on your link-building effort a lot faster.
Standing out from the crowd online is getting more competitive with each passing day. To achieve this, you must take steps and make efforts that others may be unwilling or unable to make. By maximizing the benefits offered by guest posting, you increase your chances of pushing your website up the SERPs. Thus, can gain more visibility. With the knowledge you have acquired in this article, you can start immediately. Better still, you can look for a professional guest posting company to help you with this task. You will be happy you did.
