Looking for a safe and effective way to promote your website or blog? Guest blogging remains a time-tested strategy for promoting a website. It involves writing and submitting blog posts to other blogs in exchange for a link. To take full advantage of this technique, though, there are a few rules that you need to follow.
1) Only Write for Relevant Blogs
Arguably, one of the most important rules to follow when guest blogging is to write for blogs that are closely related to your niche. If you manage a website about pets, for instance, you should focus your guest blogging efforts on blogs in the pet niche. Search engines pay close attention to link relevancy, meaning links placed on websites that are related to yours will hold far more weight than generic links. Take a few minutes to browse through the content of prospective guest blogs to get a feel for their content.
2) Don’t Write for Spam-Filled Blogs
Another guest blogging rule is to avoid writing for blogs that are filled with spam. How do you determine whether or not a blog has spam? Well, you’ll have to do some investigative research. Go through the previous blog posts to see how many outbound links they contain, and where those links are going. Ideally, blogs should have a minimum number of outbound links, all of which go to relevant sites. If it has dozens of links pointing to thin “gateway” pages that were designed strictly for promotional purposes, submitting a guest post here may do more harm than good.
3) Beware of Over-Optimized Anchor Text
Google has cracked down on the user of over-optimized anchor text in recent years, penalizing offending sites. When creating guest blog posts, it’s usually best to avoid using keyword-rich anchor text for your backlinks. A safer strategy is to stick with your website’s name (e.g. Why I Started a Blog), or the actual HTML link (e.g. http://whyistartedablog.com). Not only are links such as this more SEO-friendly, but visitors can identify them more easily, meaning you’ll receive more traffic.
4) Content Quality Matters
As a guest blogger, you want to put your best foot forward so visitors will remember who you are and what your website is. Regardless of what you intend to write about, spend ample time researching the topic, writing, and then proofreading/editing. Attempting to submit a poorly written post to a blog may result in a rejection. And even if the blog accepts it, having your name tied to a low-quality post will only hurt your efforts in the long run.
5) Diversify Your Submissions
Last but not least, diversify your post submissions across multiple blogs. Even if you found a high-traffic blog that’s within your niche, you should still submit posts to other blogs as well. Diversification is the key to success when it comes to guest blogging.
Have any other guest blogging tips that you would like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!
Remember to promote your guest blog post to your social media and ask that the owner of the blog do the same. This not only benefits them, but increases the exposure of your work to both audiences.