We love guest blogging, but then I suppose we’re a little biased! Especially since we run a guest blogging opportunities platform! So I thought it was about time that I explained the benefits of guest blogging from the perspective of improved search engine rankings. For those that don’t know, boosting your search engine rankings is a process called search engine optimisation or SEO.
Search Engine Ranking Factors
If you take a look at the SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors, you’ll see that a large proportion of the factors that influence your search engine rankings are all about external links. In particular, you’ll notice that the following factors are at the top of the list:
- anchor text matching desired keywords
- quantity of external links
- quality of external links
- link diversity
Since guest blogging is about writing a quality article and then getting links back to your website, guest blogging is basically a form of link building. Guest blogging offers you the opportunity build links whilst meeting the above ranking factors.
And here’s why.
1. Choice of keywords
As long as your article is relevant to the host blog and it meets their requirements, you have a great deal of freedom in your choice of anchor text. You just need to ensure that the anchor text fits naturally within the author credit paragraph.
I say natural, because you don’t want to take advantage of the goodwill of the host blog, nor do you want to irritate readers of the host blog by creating grammatically-awkward sentences.
For example:
- Good: This article is by Dave Smith, who’s an orthodontic dentist based in Basingstoke, who’s a bit of geek when it comes to dental care.
- Bad: This article is by Dave Smith, who’s an orthodontic dentist Basingstoke, who’s a bit of geek when it comes to dental care.
2. Quantity of external links
If you look around your niche, you’ll find potentially hundreds of blogs who are interested in you writing for them. That’s a lot of links!
For example, if you own a homemade sweets blog, you could write for home craft blogs, recipe websites, sweet shop blogs, blogs aimed at parent-child activities, cake blogs, etc. With a little imagination, you can end up with a massive audience.
3. Quality of external links
If you find a blog that has 100% unique content and is regularly updated, it’s a reasonable assumption that the blog is a high-quality website. The word ‘quality’ has many different meanings, but in this context, I mean three things:
- the articles on the blog are worth reading
- the blog has a regular readership
- the blog isn’t using spammy or unethical practices for marketing and promotion
Based on this, the search engines are also likely to consider that website to be of reasonably quality, and therefore assign some value to any links you get from that blog. The greater the quality of that link, typically the better the rankings you’ll achieve from that link.
4. Link diversity
If you have links from a variety of sources (i.e. many websites), that means you have a broad link profile. I believe that diversity is considered a ranking factor simply because:
“…if everyone thinks your site is worth linking to, then it must be a good website, and therefore deserves good search engine rankings…”
Good guest blogging should be about writing for a large number of websites in your niche, which means you automatically add some diversity to your incoming links.
5. Link context
Although not a top-ranking factor, context is a factor for search engine rankings. All this means is that you have links from related websites linking to each other. Too many links from unrelated websites is often a sign of spammy link building.
For example, it’s reasonable to have a website about cakes linking to a website about confectionery, however, linking to a website about cars is out of place.
By focusing on getting links to your website from only related niches, all of your links will be from websites relevant to your website’s niche.
Conclusion
Simply put, guest blogging can be a time-efficient method of building backlinks to your website as part of your SEO work. It shouldn’t be the only link building and SEO process you use, but it’s certainly worth doing.
And if you’re looking to find host blogs to write guest posts for, be sure to join Blog Synergy!
These are all excellent and well thought through points for a link building strategy that does work. I have successfully used this method myself and given your expertise on the subject I would be very happy for you to write a guest post on my blog.
It just so happens that this topic is touched upon in several categories so the whole subject of SEO is open for a contribution if you are interested, I think Blog Synergy is a site I would be more than happy to promote on my blog.
Backlinks may become a worthwhile advantage as well as help in off page search engine optimization. Have you ever seen text links result in a reverse effect on Yahoo rankings? And do you know if there is a technique to find when PPC is better than building links? I personally participate in numerous webpages and even help out with a link building company. Even so, I at times find it beneficial to use paying per click to building links.
Now that makes sense and now I have something to ponder as I was not thinking or acting this way. Guess it is time for to take action and do as suggested – become a gust blogger as I love the SEO angle. Thanks Gregory Burrus