There is no hotter or popular form of content marketing other than guest posting. For years, there has been one relentless drum beat stating that a business should build great content. The only problem is that building great content is not a guarantee that the website will be able to get a better ranking in search engines or will be able to get the targeted traffic it wants. Links are the key when a business wishes to maximize search engine optimization and drive traffic to its website in order to increase its sales and profits. This is where guest blogging comes in as it is not just the perfect vehicle for content marketing, but also for the purpose of link building.
However, there are some problems that businesses will face when they have decided to make guest posts. First of all, the explosion of the guest blogging concept has led to the creation of countless blogs that are made for guest blogging and claim to have a great network that can be of use to companies in different industries. This ‘abuse’ of the concept has forced Google into discouraging this practice for SEO purposes because of the poor quality of posts and spam that’s posted on most of the specialist guest blogging websites and blogs.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that the concept of making guest posts is dead. It can still be highly effective for link building. Another important factor that a business should keep in mind is that guest posting is entirely different from article syndication and mixing the two up would lead to undesirable results. Content creation is not the first step to making a guest post as it is in the case of article syndication. Priority one is to find relevant and high quality blogs where guest posts can be made.
A business needs to look for three things when it is trying to find the home of its guest post and they are:
1- Relevance: The blog that you are considering should be related to the niche of the business. This might be tough to find because most of these blogs will be operated by competitors who will not be willing to let you guest post. In this case, the relevance can be stretched a little bit by looking for related websites.
2- Trust signals: Go over the information posted on the blog and see if you are able to trust it. The first three posts will be excellent indicators about the reliability and credibility of the blog.
3- Popularity and indexing: There is no use of a blog that isn’t indexed regularly by the search engine crawlers. Also, the blog may have relevant posts, but if they aren’t posted and shared, there isn’t any point of making any guest posts. You need to find an active blog that sees a lot of participation from the audience and search engines alike.
With this guide, a business will be able to use guest posting for exposing and promoting the business in the industry through backlinks.