While guest blogging originally started out as a SEO strategy used by webmasters as a way to get high quality content on their sites without having to write it themselves, it quickly became a link building tactic used to build links for SEO. Before long, mass amounts of spammy, low quality content was produced by guest bloggers, as a way to gain links. As a result, Google devalued these links and guest blogging lost serious credibility and was referred to as a “dead” SEO tactic.
Is Guest Blogging Dead?
The truth is guest blogging, when done correctly, is still an awesome strategy and can be beneficial to your website. A good guest blogging strategy can help your increase your audience reach, build brand recognition, increase referral traffic and sales. Guest blogging isn’t dead, instead it is just very difficult to have a guest blog accepted and posted because the standards of good blog posts have been elevated. But what exactly is considered good guest blogging practices and how can you spot guest blog spam? If you use guest blogs on your site, you’ll need to keep the quality level of your guest posts very high.
How Can Guest Blogging Help Your SEO?
When executed correctly, guest blogging still has the ability to help your SEO. A good guest post by an authoritative source can improve your overall site authority and increase your long-tail keyword traffic, which is becoming a major component of organic traffic.
Here’s my tips for effective SEO-friendly guest blogging:
- Make Sure it’s Relevant – Only write guest posts or accept guest content from sites that are relevant to your target audience or niche. When looking for a site to contribute content to seek out ones that are high quality and experts in your industry. Ideally, you want to contribute to a blog with a following larger than your own. Contributing content to a larger, relevant blog is key to increasing traffic, sales and branding because it will provide good exposure.
- Original Content Only- One of the most important criteria for a good guest blog is whether or not the content is original. As we all know, Google penalizes duplicate content. So make sure your post is unique and appears on a site that also has good to great unique content, and Google won’t give you any problems.
- Avoid Rich Anchor Text- One of the major red flags for guest blogging is the use of rich anchor text. Rich anchor links contain your targeted keyword within link text that points to a page on your site. It’s extremely important that your links are authentic and make sense, which brings me to my next point…
- Link Wisely- Include links only when needed and avoid only linking to your own site. The over use of irrelevant links can trigger Google’s algorithm to indicate spam. Include valuable links or resources that will provide further insight for your readers, whether these links point to your site or another site. At most, include 3-5 links to your site including one in your author bio on a 500 – 800 word guest post.