Guest Posting – What Is It? How to Do It and How Does It Affect SEO?
We live in the era of bloggers and blogs which are becoming increasingly popular year by year. Everyone can set up such a website, regardless of the interests, skills or the size of the target group. Although you may treat your blog solely as a hobby, it can become an irreplaceable tool for advertising the brand or the whole company.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that… you should create your blog content by yourself. However, from time to time, it’s also worth taking advantage of guest posting which is about inviting someone to write a guest article for you or creating such a text for someone else by yourself.
Guest posting – what is it?
As the term itself suggests, guest posting is about someone else (a guest) publishing on your website. It’s not only about publishing another person’s entry on your blog but also about you creating content for someone else.
Guest posting for someone else
Advantages
As we’ve already mentioned, guest posting may involve creating a valuable blog entry for someone else or for a company that isn’t yours. The first and foremost advantage of this type of activity from the SEO point of view is obtaining links. In order to make guest posting profitable for you, the links should be of top quality. Depending on the arrangements you’ve made with the website owner, such a link may be placed in the footer (in the form of the author’s name or caption) or in the content (in the form of a reference to another article you’ve published on your blog).
Secondly, guest posting allows you to reach a wider range of potential recipients. It’s also important to mention that apart from branding (building brand recognition), publishing on new websites enables you to reach new potential customers who might be interested in your products or services. Writing reliable and comprehensive content will help you position yourself as an expert in a given field.
Disadvantages
Everything has its pros and cons. One of the disadvantages of guest posting is the fact that you spend a lot of time and effort writing for someone else’s website. You create valuable content for that person, not for yourself. You also can’t influence the ultimate look of your article, don’t have direct access to the comments and don’t receive notifications.
When is it beneficial to guest post for someone else?
Wondering when it can be profitable to guest post? First of all, do it if you want to be seen as an expert in the field. It’s almost infeasible to achieve that when you publish only on your own website. Guest posting can also be helpful if you want to mark your presence on a valuable and eagerly visited site.
Where to publish your posts and how to choose appropriate websites?
You already know why and when it’s worth guest posting. However, how to make a decision where you should publish your valuable entry? It’s a good idea to follow the principles below.
First of all, choose websites that operate in the same industry or reach a similar group of recipients. However, avoid writing for blogs of your direct rivals on the market. Second of all, analyze the parameters of potential websites you want to create for with the use of suitable tools. The most relevant indicators you need to check are Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR). You can scrutinize them with the use of Ahrefs.
What to keep in mind when guest posting?
While creating content for a selected website, it’s worth making sure that the entry comprises only comprehensive, reliable and quality information. You should neither reproduce or duplicate texts from other websites. Too many links may also deter users and have a negative impact on the website authority.
Moreover, consider whether you want to brand your articles with a persona created especially for this purpose or whether you prefer to use the whole company and choose a few experts who will give their real names and positions to sign the texts.
How to properly anchor your link?
Ok, you’ve prepared a valuable text and selected a website you want to publish it on (with the owner’s consent). Now you need to properly anchor your link.
First of all, you need to remember that the added link should always be a “dofollow” one as such links tell Google robots to follow them. Consequently, the robots visit the page the link leads to. More importantly, dofollow links transmit the power of the site they come from to the linked page. Discuss this issue with the site owner already at the initial stages of your cooperation.
If possible, link to an optimized anchor, meaning the visible part of the link with the keyword. Here, it’s essential to select the appropriate keyword phrase and a landing page that matches it.
How does guest posting affect SEO?
In a nutshell, the visibility in Google is affected by at least several dozen different elements. One of the ranking factors is all the content you publish on your website. By analyzing your content, Google robots can learn the subject matter of your site and then match the subpages to individual search queries entered by users into the search bar.
Links leading directly to your website are another very important factor. Currently, guest posting is one of the most popular methods of obtaining links. Therefore, it affects directly both of the mentioned ranking factors and consequently is considered to be very helpful in running any SEO activities.
Publishing guest posts on your website
Advantages
One of the major advantages of someone else guest posting on your website isb> obtaining quality content. It’s especially beneficial if you manage to start cooperation with a person treated as a father figure in a given industry. Moreover, authors who guest post for you will probably share their articles on their own websites and thus advertise your blog and increase its reach.
Guest posting is also an ideal solution if you don’t have time or skills to create satisfactory content by yourself.
Disadvantages
One of the disadvantages of guest posting and publishing someone else’s posts on your website is simply the fact that the articles aren’t of your authorship. Instead, you position another person as an expert and at the same time encourage your readers to visit the website of that person. Usually, websites which benefit from guest posting come from the same or a very similar industry, therefore, such practices may result in helping your competition and creating rivals of your own company.
When to apply guest posting at your blog and how to choose authors?
It’s worth applying guest posting if you want to almost effortlessly increase the number of your blog posts. This type of content is extremely important as it ensures that your website is displayed in the search engine on many more phrases. If you convince a person popular in a given industry to guest post for you, then, you can get a “free” advertisement of your website, services or products. Therefore, this is the main criterion you should take into consideration when choosing authors to whom you want to offer creating entries for you.
How does guest posting on your website affect SEO?
Publishing guest posts helps you to increase the number of entries on your blog. And this is important not only in terms of providing users with top notch texts. The more content on a website, the bigger the number of keywords it’s displayed on in Google.
Too much of a good thing…
However, there is one tiny problem. Although guest posting seems to be an ideal way of obtaining a lot of content without much effort, the online world doesn’t work like that. Google doesn’t appreciate websites whose content does nothing apart from linking to other sites. Sometimes it even happens that such a site is punished with a manual filter. To avoid this, make sure that guest posting is only a bonus to your regular content. You can also mark links with “nofollow” or “sponsored” attributes.
To sum up
Guest posting on other websites is a perfect method of marking your presence in the industry and advertising your site among new recipients. It’s a very small but at the same time very important part of off-site SEO which helps to obtain quality backlinks that not only increase traffic to your site but also confirm your website authority.
On the other hand, publishing guest posts on your website is an important on-site SEO activity that helps you to get more valuable content and keywords. Apart from that, guest posting provides a great opportunity for establishing contacts and starting cooperations within a given industry.
Interested in writing a guest post for our blog and obtaining a quality backlink? Or maybe you’d like to publish an industry article written by our specialists? Don’t hesitate to contact us!
