What is guest blogging in SEO? A Beginner’s Guide
What is guest blogging?
Guest blogging, also known as guest blogging, is the practice of contributing a post to someone else’s blog to build relationships, exposure, authority, and links.
Links are a top-ranking factor on Google, and SEO guest blogging offers a great opportunity to secure a link from another website, in addition to other marketing considerations.
Guest blogging builds a relationship with the blogger who hosts your post, connects with your audience for additional exposure, and helps you establish authority among an audience.
The concept is simple: you write a blog article according to the requirements of a particular blogger and you get a backlink in return, usually at the bottom of the article, which is called the Author Box.
Bloggers are interested in posting high-quality content on their blogs that they can use to attract new readers, as well as share with their current audience. This makes guest blogging a beneficial solution for both website owners, who want to rank higher in search engines (and need links to do so), and bloggers who are interested in attracting more. readers to your blog.
Our Guest Blogging Good For SEO And Link Building?
The short answer is yes.
However, like any tactic, guest blogging can be abused.
In 2014 Matt Cutts, then Director of Webspam at Google announced “the decline and fall of guest blogging.”
Despite this proclamation, guest blogging remains a powerful online marketing tactic. Today in 2017, guest blogging is probably one of the best methods for building powerful links.
In this article, I will share with you some valuable information on how to guest blog the right way and minimize risks.
Are guest blogging good for bloggers?
The short answer is again yes.
As long as the blogger is insightful and willing to spend time classifying and editing posts from external sources, guest blogging can be a great source of valuable content for a blogger’s audience.
An important part of editing any external contribution is checking the links within the content. You should not include a link unless it makes editorial sense.
Just take a look at this (or any other) guest blogging and inbound marketing post written by Neil Patel. There is an external link in almost every paragraph. You see, Neil knows that links add value to a post by providing more information and additional resources. Be like Neil.
To stay safe, analyze guest posts for quality and make sure to link only to quality websites that add value to the web.
You can also regularly check your external links with a tool like Screaming Frog to make sure the websites you’re linking to are still available, don’t return a 404 or redirect to different content.
How to find sites that accept guest posts and external contributors
There are two main ways to find sites for the purpose of guest blogging:
- Prospecting on the web (search with Google, social networks, lists of mining resources, etc.)
- Use websites that connect editors and bloggers.
This post describes four websites that exist to connect editors and bloggers.
I have used some of them and I can tell you that they really are not as effective and popular as I would like. Most of the blogs are very young and run by webmasters who rarely write and want quality content for free. Although the fish are relatively small, I recommend registering with some of the services to monitor the offers and wait for your white whale.
There are some really cool ways to find guest blogging through the first method, prospecting the web, which I’ll cover below.
Search lists of top blogs
The first step in prospecting is pretty obvious: type in a phrase like “Top Blog List [for a specific industry]”, that is, “Top Personal Savings Blog List” into Google, and review the results.
Visit all the blogs listed one by one on each page of the search results.
You will most likely find really good blogs this way, but only some of them can accept guest posts from contributors.
Advanced search with search strings
Google has many search strings to help you find specific material on the web, which you can combine into search strings.
If you are new to this, you can learn more here or here. If you search for [“keyword” and “write to us”], your results will look like the image below:
This search command will show you pages that contain the exact phrases, in this case, pages that use both “blogging” and “writing for us.”
This process is simple and complex; There are only a few modifiers, but they can be combined in many different ways. The only limit is your creativity.
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There are an almost infinite number of combinations that will help you find blogs that are interested in accepting guest posts.
Some example search strings:
- “guest author” “keyword”
- “guest post” “keyword”
- “keyword” inurl: collaborators
- “keyword” inurl: authors
- intitle: “guest post” “keyword”
- inurl: “keyword” “contributor”
- Follow the people or companies who actively invite the blog
One of the best ways to find great guest blogging opportunities is to find others who consistently contribute quality guest posts to industry-related websites.
Most people and businesses share their posts through social media profiles. I once came across a Twitter profile that primarily shared their guest posts, so I was able to greatly expand my own list in a short amount of time.
Try this search string to find sites where a specific person or company has published a guest post: “person’s name” OR “company name” “guest post. “
There are many ways to find relevant blogs, but these three approaches should keep you busy for a long time.
I’d love to hear your own prospecting ideas in the comments.
The Inconvenient Truth: Some Bloggers HATE Being Asked About Guest Blogging
Sites that don’t request guest posts may not be open to outside contributions.
It depends on the industry, but you should be prepared for a low response rate. Good blogs get constant emails with guest posts, so they may not even reply. This is especially true if you email a blogger who doesn’t accept guest posts.
Why are some blogs not accepting external content? The answer is simple: the tactic has been spammed in the past by SEOs who are not interested in readers. They send cheap and poorly written articles, they only care about the link.
All good blogs have real readers and they care deeply about the content they post, so they go through every copy sent to them, which takes VERY time. After so much spam, they have given up and prefer not to accept any guest articles.
Armed with the knowledge that bloggers are really busy people, don’t expect them to do extra work, reading lengths, and emails. Make sure your email is as short and concise as possible while being personalized and offering explicit value to the person you are emailing.
Here you can see the proposal I submitted to secure the guest post you are reading right now:
As you can see, I submitted a topic that I knew the editor, Cory, would care about. I also explained a short synopsis of why it was valuable: the length, the topic, the information covered, the unique assets.
Most bloggers are fed up with the generic topics that are covered on every website and are looking for something unique and interesting.
So if you’re going to launch a guest post, make sure it’s worth it.
