Introduction
Guest posting is an easy way to attract new visitors to check out your website. Working with a variety of guest bloggers that already have a following may boost traffic by attracting those followers to your website. The trick is for you to keep those visitors coming back to your website for fresh, quality content.
The main idea behind guest posting is a quid pro quo: you offer your website or social media platform to a guest poster for them to share their opinions or expertise on a subject in return for access to your audience. By mixing the two crowds, you are both hoping to attract fans from each other’s community of followers. Most guest posters are doing it for this networking experience and the potential to grow their followers and usually do not get paid directly for their content.
Be Judicious
Although accepting guest posts is an easy way to grow your blog without having to do a ton of writing yourself, there is also a need to be selective with just who you want to write for you. Ultimately, the potential guest poster’s subject matter expertise needs to be in your niche or the whole tradeoff is devalued, if of any value at all.
The most important thing to consider is the quality of their work. Does your potential guest poster carry weight? Do people follow their work? They need to offer your readers something unique, yet relevant to your business. There is a lot of content on the Internet and most of it is bad. If your content is not worth reading, viewers will go somewhere else.
Guest Posting for the Right Reasons
Today, guest posting is about building the authority and trust of your website as well as the guest author in the eyes of both search engines and actual human viewers. It is for building brand, increasing email subscribers and social media followers, networking, and exploring promotional channels.
Professional bloggers need guest posting to network with influencers and other subject matter experts. It helps grow their reputation and solidify a widely accepted positive image of their brand. Businesses are often looking to attract customers to their website.
Actually, guest posting is for everything but the links.
Certain Backlinks Are Important
Website or social media platform traffic is mostly dependent on high ranking in search engine search results. High search engine results rankings require high-quality, natural links to relevant content. These relevant, in-article, content links are important to help boost your website’s ranking authority, but alone will likely not lift it above the competition. They are only one tool, so you do not want to overuse it.
It is a mistake to use aggressive guest post link building strategies. These are outdated SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing or building web pages for every keyword variation and will actually hurt your brand and you will drop in ranking and could incur a Google Penalty.
Guest posts are a way to provide direct referral traffic, but unfortunately, it is not as much as you might think. According to some studies done by experts on the subject (just Google “Guest Post ROI”), the referrals can be quite low, especially when the link back to the writer’s website relies on the often overlooked “author link” for recognition.
So, if you are accepting a guest post on your website, provide a link to their website or social media platform at the end of the post. Give a short author’s bio that includes an invitation for others to pitch an article to you and allow them to include a few relevant anchor text links in the body of the article as well. By doing this, you offer your guest writer some recognition and exposure for their time. This also lets other potential writers know you are open to guest posting and network building.
If you are the guest poster, request the aforementioned items from the site for which you are writing. If they do not agree, move on to another website. Guest posts that do not include this recognition and linking are simply not worth your time.
Conclusion
Guest posting can be a way to enhance your brand identity as well as bring in some new traffic to your website. Just remember, quality is essential.
Guest posting for SEO value is not bad, but guest posting for only SEO value is.
To make the most out guest posting and improve your search rankings, it is important to:
- Guest post on relevant blogs or websites
- Avoid keyword-stuffed anchor text, consider instead natural, related, longtail and branded keywords
- Link only to on topic content if it enhances the message of your article
The formula is remarkably simple. Provide value through your guest posts and Google will reward you in search results.
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