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SEO for Beginners: SEO Benefits of Guest Blogging

Google always gives prominence to fresh and unique content. But, simply writing a unique content won’t help much in your SEO. Content marketing is also very important for the success of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Guest blogging nowadays is playing a major role to gain credibility and networking opportunities. So today, I’ll discuss what guest blogging is, how to make most out of guest blogging and what are its benefits.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is a SEO technique where someone writes and publishes a blogpost on a third party website to promote their brand. It exposes your brand to relevant audience and can be an effective method to generate awareness.

Many people have wrong believe that guest blogging is no longer good option for improving search engine rankings. But, this is not true. The Forbes’s article, “Guest Blogging for SEO is Dead… or Is It?” Explains how people misunderstood Matcutt’s statement “Stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done”.

 
How to do guest blogging for your site?

Basically there are three goals associated with guest blogging. Hence, before you start doing guest blogging for your site, you need to determine what your guest blogging goal is. It can be either positioning yourself as an authority or getting traffic to your website or building backlinks to your website. If you want to get more traffic and build your authority, you should find websites that has engaging content with number of audience. But if you want to get good number of backlinks then you just have to find blogs with strong root domain authority.

 
Where to Guest Post

When you find sites to guest post there are few points which you need to consider –

The content is focused on your niche and industry.
The blog has good number of visitors and engaging content.
The blog owner is active on social media.

Now the question is how to do guest blogging. So here is the list of ways which can be helpful to you –

guest blogging infographics
 

#1. Competitor backlinks – There are various tools available in the market like SEMrush, Open Site explorer etc. which provides you with list of sites from where your competitors have received links. It’s possible that they have received atleast one or two links from a blog post. You can spot such links and create a separate list of them. The other way of finding it is by using command domain.com -domain.com “guest post”. Replacing domain.com with your competitor domain name will give you the list of blogging site for which your competitors have written for.

#2. Prolific guest bloggers – Search for blogs in your industry and see which author’s blog you see more often. Once you have the list, start finding the sites where these bloggers have posted upon. You can do this by doing Google search using phrase “guest post by - author name”. These websites would be a great place for you to post upon as well.

#3. Use your blog – This can be one of the easiest way of getting links. Let’s suppose that some of your readers have their own blog or their website needs more content. Put up a blog post for them saying you are available for guest posts with list of topics of your expertise or topics you may be interested in writing about. You might be surprised with the response you get.

#4. Social searches – Number of bloggers frequently share their new guest post on social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. It is also suggested to do Twitter search for discovering recent guest post in your industry. All you need to do is follow the links and check which of them accepts guest post for you.

 
Benefits of Guest Posting

Improves Visibility and Social Growth - Apart from getting links, social media profiles can help you improve your visibility and online presence. If anyone visits the blog and likes your article, it’s obvious that they will share your article on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ which will speed up the growth in social media and drive traffic to your articles which in turn strengthens your authority and allows your content to rank higher in search results. Besides this, most of the blogs have comment section below every article which could lead to great networking opportunities or sales.

More relevant traffic – Most of the people who clicks on the links you provide in a guest post is more likely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer than a general visitor. So it’s very important that your blog content is engaging enough for your visitors and they click on the link provided.

Increases your authority – Another advantage of guest blogging is that it helps to build domain name and search engine authority especially if your website is new. It’s really very difficult to gain authority for them. But with the help of guest blogging you can easily develop authority of your website in around 8 months.

Increases your exposure and brand awareness - This is another great advantage of guest post. When you mention your brand name in a blog post with 5000 visitors, and only few people visit your website, it’s obvious that your name will be exposed to almost all of them. This way you’ll get more people visit your blog.

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References –The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging

 

author
Annu Singh

Annu is B.E Information Science and is currently a search specialist at Megistron Media. She specializes in campaign audits & management, execution and creating solutions for global clients.