If you have a website or blog that isn’t getting enough traffic, then the odds are that your link profile is not giving your site the authority it needs to rank. Google’s search algorithm looks at the quality and quantity of links that a website has in determining how high to rank the site. In the old days, all an SEO Agency had to do to rank on the first page of Google was to buy a bunch of spam links from private blog networks. Their website ranked number one on Google in a week which gave us the phrase “black hat SEO.” Then, Google got smart and implemented a series of updates to bury spammy websites.
While it is still possible to rank websites using underhanded tactics, at least for a month or two, Google has changed the playing field to reward websites that get legitimate links from quality websites. This is called “white hat SEO.”
The only problem with white hat search engine optimization is that a lot of people don’t know how to do it.
However, it is the most effective way to grow revenue without risking a Google penalty.
Guest posting is a win/win strategy for earning white hat links to your site. The host site and the guest poster come out ahead because the host site gets quality content that will increase its ranking in Google passively over time, and the guest poster can increase his/her ranking too with the links they receive from their posts.
Guest blogs are are a superb way to start optimizing your website for search, and one of the first places any blogger or online business owner should start when they start thinking about scaling their website. Start here for a list of websites that accept guest posts.
Guest posts/guest blogging doesn’t need to be hard, and it shouldn’t be spammy.
Submit quality content to quality publications, and you can get one or more quality links to your website per post. What do you think is more likely to be shared on social media, exponentially increasing the traffic to the page? A well thought out, intelligently written and well-researched piece, or one written by someone on Fiverr for five bucks?
If you are going to go white hat SEO in your strategy, then your content should speak for itself. #SEO #marketing #smallbusiness Share on XWhen the website that you are posting to has a high SEO ranking, then you get to piggyback off their ranking and pull some search engine traffic to your site. If the site you posted to lets you put a link to your website with good placement, you could see a small percentage of the traffic flow through to your website as referral traffic. Just like stock market investors get dividends from their investments, bloggers get dividends in the form of traffic to their website.
Traffic is the goal
It’s easy to get caught up in a content war and trying to produce more content than your competitors to outrank them in search rankings. Don’t fall for this. Instead, create high-quality content and guest post on high-quality websites. Then you can get links from word of mouth. Low-quality content rarely goes viral. Again, traffic should be your goal. Try to only post on sites that get legitimate traffic. It isn’t uncommon for quality guest posts to receive thousands of views shortly after posting, followed by a small but steady stream of Google traffic to the post.
Target Keywords
You can maximize the traffic you get from guest posting by intelligently selecting keywords. With some experience, you can pick keywords based on the guest site’s domain authority and the keyword competition. For example, a guest post on a moderately popular blog titled “lose weight fast” may not be able to rank for that keyword. But a related weight loss keyword with a more moderated level of competition could see the post get steady traffic over time from Google. The most important keyword to choose is the title. You would also do well to research and use a few long tail keywords in your article combined with relevant links to your website.
Guest posts are an excellent way to build the profile of your website in a low risk and high reward way. Take advantage of them to pull your business to the next level!