Guest posting is one of the trending SEO tactics in the Google Panda and Penguin era, where a thoughtless link building campaign can lead to a complete disaster. However, still many of the folks are clueless about guest posting, so this blog post is intended to break the ice, and explain this concept in a simplistic manner.
What is Guest Posting All About?
Put in simple words, guest posts are highly researched articles contributed to the most authoritative blogs in a specific niche, which contain a back-link to your website in the concluding (author bio) section of the article. Now, since these articles are informative, unique, and captivating, they project the author as an expert in that niche. And, the readers consider website linked to, as an authoritative source too. Moreover, since these links are contextual and highly relevant, they carry a great weightage in SEO terms.
Benefits of Guest Posts
Benefits of guest posts are not limited to organic SEO and improvement in SERP rankings alone, but they also –
- Help in driving more referral traffic
- Improving authority of your website
- Improving Alexa ranking of your website
- Boosting up Google – Pagerank of your site
- Proofing your site against a Penguin-slap
- Increasing visibility in major search engines, and
- Of course, a significant boost in your SERP rankings for your target keywords.
Furthermore, guest posting is a perfectly White-SEO methodology of building links, and it’s widely acclaimed by all major search engines as one of the best ways of improving the authority of a website.
Alas – It’s Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea!
Having seen all those wonderful benefits, it’s equally important to understand that it’s easier said than done, and when you actually try to do it, you’d realize that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not just about creating high quality content, because there’s lot more to it!
It may take months for you to identify the webmasters and blog owners of all the popular websites and blogs in your niche, and get your guest posts published on them. Therefore, it’s recommended to find a guest posting service provider that takes care of the whole process for you.
Sure thing, you don’t need to burn holes in your pockets for this, and it’s possible to find dozens of cheap providers in the markets, but it’s equally important to pick a company that focuses on quality.
Generating back-links from hundreds of mediocre blogs may not help you as much as just a dozen links from highly authoritative blogs in your niche; hence, it’s extremely vital to find a provider that can get the job done flawlessly.
Now that you know what guest posting is, and how it really works, it wouldn’t really make too much sense not to include guest posting as a part of your SEO campaigns. Even if you’re not doing SEO for your own website, and have given a contract to an SEO agency, then it’s time for you to ask your vendor whether they’re doing any guest posts for your website. And, if you don’t get a positive response, then you’d be better off outsourcing guest posting work to a specialized provider that has vast experience in this industry.