Link Building for SEO

Guest Blogging is a powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactic that is effective for both buildings links and increasing traffic to your website.  I have used Guest Blogging since 2009 and now in 2011 I still spend a substantial amount of my search engine consulting time implementing and managing on-going Guest Blogging for my business and ecommerce clients.  

So what does a web business owner need to know about Guest Blogging?  This article defines Guest Blogging and it's benefits for SEO and then explores the implementation strategy for a business website Guest Blogging program.

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest Blogging is the process of posting articles on someone elses blog.  Let's call the other persons blog the Guest Blog.  You, your staff or your SEO consultant or  service create the article and provide it to the Guest Blog owner.  Usually the Guest Blog owner will approve and possibily edit your articles before posting it to their blog.  

Typically, almost all blogs focus on very specific topic, and a Guest Blog is no exception.  So you must find a Guest Blog that is in a suitable niche for the topic of your article.  

There are blog websites that specialized in hosting Guest Blog articles, and there are blogs that allow only occasional Guest Blog posts. 

Guest Blogging has many benefits including driving traffic to your site, advertising your services/products, reaching new audiences, improving your reputation, sharing your knowledge, reciprocal posting to your blog, and of course helping your search engine ranking -- which is my focus in this article.

Why is Guest Blogging an Important SEO Tactic?

As a SEO tactic, Guest Blogging is very effective for building links to your website.  As many web business owners are aware, the quality of the links to your website are one of the most important factors for increasing the rank of your website. 

In fact, some SEO experts believe the link quality comprises 60-70% of the criteria used by Google when ranking your website.

Guest Blogging can provide some of the very highest quality links to your website available on the web.  In my opinion, Guest Blog links are typically much higher quality that directory links, social networking, social news, and paid linking.

Finding Guest Blogs is a complex process with many variables.  But in general you want to find Guest Blogs that are related to your website, have decent Google quality signals (i.e. link trust, etc.) and have respectable traffic. The levels of these criteria are all relative to your industry's competition, so no one formula applies to all websites.  I will be writing a future article on finding guest blogs.

The SEO industry strongly supports the use of Guest Blogging for increasing search engine rank.  In fact, there is one very prominent SEO expert that uses Guest Blogging as her only link building tactic. 

Implementing Guest Blogging

Like most things in life that are valuable, putting a Guest Blogging program into practice on your website takes a lot of effort.  Here is a summary of the steps:

1. Identify or create pages on your website to receive links from Guest Blog posts
2. Create a "Guest Blog Plan" which is a list of topics and keywords for articles
3. Research existing blogs in your niche that offer Guest Blog posting
4. Create a series of articles based on the Guest Blog Plan
5. Articles must be unique, contain high quality valuable content, nice photo and at least 400 words
6. Make sure keywords are in the title of the article
7. Perform on-page SEO on each article
8. Include a link back to your website's landing page
9. Submit the articles to the Guest Blogs, monitor publication
10. Submit the Guest Blog post to Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media you use
11. Respond to comments on your Guest Blog posts.

And here are a few important things NOT to do when Guest Blogging:

1. Steal content or infringe on the copyright of others
2. Write poorly researched articles with no valuable content
3. Hire a non-native English speaking writer (in most cases)
4. Submit a Guest Blog with poor grammar, spelling and English structure
5. Stuff your article with keywords and backlinks to your website
6. Get upset if your article is edited or even rejected (just move on)

Summary

Guest Blogging is a powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactic that is a must do for business websites that depend on traffic from Google and other search engines.  It requires creating quality articles related to your industry or products and then finding Guest Blogs upon which to post your articles.  Guest Blogging is a lot of work but worth it if your web business depends on high search engine ranking and traffic to create results. 

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