Guest Blogging is the best form of link building to build your inbound link campaign. If you select the right website to publish your article, you will receive high social shares and a strong backlink. But how do you know how to select the right website?
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What Is Guest Blogging
Guest blogging allows you to submit your article to a website and the site owner publishes your article on their site. Within your article contains your backlink and any information you wish to talk about in your post. Gaining quality inbound links from reliable sources will increase your rankings on Google, brand awareness and traffic. Producing high value content will also establish yourself as a quality author within your industry. None of the above matters if you submit your article to the wrong websites.
1. Is The Website Relevant
The site your submitting your article to must be relevant with your website. Having links from sites that are irrelevant to your own will not strengthen your inbound links. Take a look at the sites content, products and services to see if they are similar to your own. If you are a web designer you want your article to be published on web designers, marketing or seo sites. You do not want to publish content on plumbing sites; this is not relevant to your site and industry at all. Relevance is the first point you should check when sourcing a website.
2. Domain Age
Using WHOIS records you can check the age of the website. You should publish your content on websites that have been around for a while and built trust with Google. Older domains tend to have web pages indexed by Google quicker. You want your article indexed on Google as quickly as possible to start receiving the benefits.
3. How Google Sees The Site
Take a look at how many pages are indexed in Google’s search results you can easily check this by typing the below in Google’s search or install the SEOquake toolbar on your browser to view all the information about the site.
If there is only a few pages indexed then the website does not have a lot of quality pages and content. This maybe because certain pages may be blocked by rel=noindex tags stopping Google from indexing. If any blog pages have this tag, don’t publish. Your article will never get indexed and you will never get credit for your backlink. The same applies if all external links are nofollow.
Older websites with quality content and a good marketing strategy tend to have a decent Google Page Rank. The higher the PageRank tends to mean higher Google authority.
4. Check For Services
Browse through the website to see if they offer any products or services. Websites that offer services or products usually have a client base. This means they can promote their website through marketing tools, such as email outreaching giving your article more chance of exposure.
5. Blog Website
There are millions of websites that only provide information through blog posts and not offer and hard services or products. In my opinion, 90% of these blogs are only created to gain PageRank to sell on. There are some high quality blogs out there but you do need to follow all these points to get the most out of your article.
6. Only Publish Guest Posts
Your website needs a lot of attention to earn target traffic. Referring to the above point, these blogs on have guest posts published on them. A website should have the owners content published as well. A good ratio to look at is 5 owner posts to every 1 guest post published. This way you can see the owners works on their site.
7. Social Signals
This is very important. A website or blog , which has high social following, will give your article a huge amount of exposure. Take a look at their social interactions and see how many likes and shares previous blog posts receive. Google rewards websites, which carry high social signals, therefore your article will gain more authority, and so will your link.
If you follow the above 7 points before you publish your article for guest blogging, you will receive the best possible exposure for your article.
on
Awesome article.
Important informations on every aspect of guest blogging. Just the way it should be!
I hope a lot of people will read it because I still see so many of them making so unnecessary mistakes. I myself do it too from time to time and such articles help me to get rid of it.
on
Although not highly focused, this article is for those guest bloggers looking to improve their SEO efforts. Guest Blogging is indeed a good link building method to improve your SEO score, but for me personally, content is better than PR. Even if you guest blog for new blogs, as long as you see that the site serves high quality content, the SEO part will just come.
Also, one thing to take note when it comes to guest blogging is to observe your own content construction. Which means that if you post a highly keyword-optimized article linking to your site, you’ll get a decent backlink, even if it’s only from a young domain.
on
Great tips.
I still think that quality articles are always better though.
on
Yes. The relevancy and quality of the website is important! With the changing Google rules, all the aforementioned factors are obligatory for an effective link building through guest posts!
The last point is an significant factor when choosing the website. I have never looked in to the website’s social following while posting! So will be considering next time!
Thanks for the share!
on
Nice article (as always) – certainly much more focus on the SEO rather than the blogging itself; a much needed aspect in today’s world. I didn’t really know how much the social signals played into SEO (even as an experienced blogger), so I can say I certainly learned something from this article! I’m most certainly going to see how well I can improve the exposure of my blog with these tips.