What is Guest Posting and Why is it Important for SEO?

Can guest posting help you with your website SEO?

It surely can!

We are in the last quarter of 2020 and people are spending more time online than ever (credit goes to numerous lockdowns globally). By creating content for other authoritative websites, you can actually drive a lot of traffic to your website and boost its rankings.

Guest posting is one of the most popular inbound marketing strategy and rightly so. Data shows that 62.96% of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.

Do you want ranking, relevant links, qualified traffic, and increased sales for your business? Guest blogging is the way to go. It sets your brand value and helps you build a high-quality relationship with your audience.

In this post, we will learn all about guest posting, how to get started with it and the importance of guest posting in SEO.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting also known as guest blogging means posting on another person’s blog as a guest author.

You write well-researched in-depth content on someone else’s website and in return you get an external backlink for your blog or company’s website.

Sounds like a simple logic with a win-win for both the parties involved. Right? But how exactly guest posting helps your website gain authority? Why is it good for SEO?

Let us find out.

What Does Guest Posting Help You Accomplish?

Guest posting has several benefits for both the guest and the host. To begin with, let us find what guest blogging accomplishes for the guest.

Guest blogging helps you grow your network. You are networking with other bloggers and making a connection that can prove to be beneficial in the long run.

In the blogging world, a large portion of the traffic comes through second-degree contacts. When people share your guest posts on their (or other’s websites),  you will increase your influence in the social media world.

Secondly, guest posting delivers your content to a completely new audience. You get a chance to tap the host’s blog audience, which is an already established community looking forward to what the blog has to offer.

For example, you can post on popular websites like Forbes or INC. If the readers here like your content, they are likely to follow you back to your company’s website and check out what other content you have to offer.

Guest posting offers you a great opportunity to connect to a completely new audience and grow your reader’s base.

Thirdly, and the most important benefit of guest posting is to give an external backlink and improve the SEO of your blog. We will cover this in detail in the next section.

What Does Guest Posting Accomplish For The Host Site?

Image Source: Influence and Co.

The stats above clearly show that editors love to have a guest post on their websites.

From the perspective of the host, guest posts add freshness to your blog. It is basically about generating interesting, new content that is too free of cost.

And if you are a prominent blog with a lot of unique visitors, you can be as pickier as you want to be. Also, there is a community sort of feeling among small to medium bloggers where they help each other out by publishing blogs.

Secondly, many bloggers get associated to form a two-way or three-way link building association. That is both the bloggers will give each other backlinks, which is a win-win situation for all.

Importance of Guest Post in SEO

Guest posting can be a great tool for building your domain authority and improving your SEO ranking if you are creating valuable content for a legitimate website.

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The way Google sees it is that if other bloggers are linking back to your blog, then your website content has some value. If there is a lot of engagement coming to your blog from an outside website i.e. when people comment, share, or link to your blog, it improves your Google page ranking.

However, page ranking is just one aspect. If you wish to establish authority, you need to keep posting high-quality content at different websites, each of a better or similar page rank as yours.

But isn’t guest posting in decline?

There have been multiple debates where SEO experts claim that guest blogging is in decline. However, it is far from being true.

Those SEO experts warn you against spammers and fake bloggers who churn out low-quality junk content and post it on irrelevant and unrelated websites just to get backlinks.

As long as you are not abusing guest blogging and are careful about what you host on your website and where you are hosting your content, guest blogging is a wonderful SEO tool.

How can I make my post-SEO-friendly?

The primary purpose of guest posting is to get an anchor text link to your website. Therefore, the nature of the links you incorporate into your text is of extreme importance

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For a layman, anchor texts are the actual words that are hyperlinked. So when you link a URL, you must make sure that the words are related to the content that the link represents.

Why is it important?

Because Google uses these anchor texts to assess a page relevance. If your page is relevant to the keyword, your website rank is likely to improve.

But do not overdo it. Posting one link with the same keyword on multiple pages may get your website penalized. You must post content in a pre-planned manner to let SEO grow organically.

Tips to Enhance Your Guest Posting Strategy

1. While many companies allow you to include links to your site in the body of the blog, some prohibit it or change the link once the blog post becomes old.Your author bio is likely the only place that will include a permanent backlink to your website. Therefore, it is essential to write a clear concise author bio. Include a link in a way that prompts people to click on it.
2. In addition to including a link back to your website, try to include one or two relevant internal links back to the company’s previous blog posts.
   When there is more than one link from different sources, Google considers that article as well-researched. Also, it will help increase the traffic to the host website and in turn your guest post.
3. Include a call-to-action and the end of every blog where you ask readers to leave comments on your post along with sharing or subscribing to your blog. The more engagement your post can drive, the better it will be for your website’s SEO.
4. Share your guest post links on all your social media networks to increase its visibility and direct traffic from your contacts (and followers) to the host’s website.
5. Keep track of how much traffic your guest post is generating. You can use Google Analytics or any other analytics tool for that. This will give you an idea of how successful your post is and what your readers want to hear.

Conclusion

Guest posting is a great inbound marketing technique that can boost your SEO rankings. The key is to avoid writing or accepting spammy content.  Follow the steps mentioned above and build only high-quality content and credible links and you are sure to see the results in your favor.