Guest Blogging: Strategies to Build Effective Links

When it comes to SEO strategies most marketing specialist will stress the importance of link building, especially through guest blogging that allows you to post back links to your website. However, Matt Cutts of Google recently said that guest blogging should be reduced as most of it was spammy. While there is a lot of merit in what Cutts has said, guest blogging can still be effective for building links and increasing search engine rankings if done effectively.

Post Only on Authoritative Sites

When you are considering a guest blogging strategy – more is not always good. Instead, research the websites or blogs that you want to contribute to and post only on authoritative sites. You can use specific tools such as Open Site Explorer to assess the authority of a site as well as the authority ranking of your own site. Use this measure to determine which blog sites will receive guest posts from you.

Post Content Only from Select Sources

Similarly, you need to ensure that your site is not the recipient of spammy blog posts. Instead, agree to post content only from sources personally known to you, your customers or vendors, and authority figures in the specific field you are dealing with. Even so, you need to vet each guest post to ensure that it is original content that will be of use to your readership, does not have spammy back links, and is well written and free from grammatical or spelling errors. Essentially, this means that the quality of the content needs to be high whether you are writing guest posts or accepting them.

Authoritative, Sharable Content

When you are creating guest blog posts you need to ensure that you are providing authoritative, sharable content. More than just generating back links, each blog post should add value to the reader and provide engaging information that they will feel like sharing. This is what will increase exposure and build the brand. Ensure that each guest blog post has some original content that sets you up as an authority in the field. In other words, you should come across as a provider of innovative ideas and leadership in the field.

Reserve the Best for Your Blog

While it is important to ensure that guest blog posts capture the attention of the new readers and brings traffic to your website, you need to ensure that the best content and most innovative ideas are reserved for your own blog site. This is what will help you retain your readership base and increase it as your readers share the blog posts using social media and other methods. While you need to ensure that guest blog posts pique the interest of the new readers, you need to keep in mind that it is a much better marketing strategy to ensure that your existing readership base stays connected with you. The quality of content in your website or blog is the key to this and should, therefore, be your priority.