What Is Guest Posting? (Why Is It Useful for SEO?)

Have you ever heard of guest blogging or guest posting?

We want to talk to you about the practice of guest posting and how to increase the website’s authority by being linked by other websites. 

Generally speaking, guest blogging is assumed as an SEO activity. With this, you host articles written by other bloggers on your website; we will explain how the whole process works and which players are involved when deciding to make guest posts.

What Is Guest Posting?

A guest post is an article (or a blog post) produced for guest blogging or guest posting.

It is a practice used for SEO link building and is quite common in the global blog scenario.

The guest post has a single meaning: It is inviting other bloggers to write their articles on your blog. In other words, we speak of guest blogging when one person offers or is asked to write their blog post.

Technically, it is the act of writing content for another company’s website. It’s like when they invite you to have tea with a friend. But the guest blogging activity is two-sided, a guest blogger, and a host blogger.

Why Should You Do Guest Posting?

Usually, guest bloggers write for blogs similar to their sector to:

• Attract new traffic to their website
• Enhance their domain authority by using external links from relevant domains
• Increase the credibility and awareness of your blog (or brand)
• Build relationships and collaborations with professionals or colleagues in the sector

What Are the Advantages of a Guest Posting for a Company?

A guest post also offers numerous advantages for a company or a freelancer.

Sharing your experience with a guest post on other sectors or relevant websites allows you to establish yourself as an authoritative figure.

It helps you build solid relationships with strategic partners or prominent personalities who will expose your brand to a whole new audience.

But can you look at guest blogging from a different perspective? We always say to our customers that with SEO, you stop looking for customers, they find you! And the same goes for SEO copywriting.

Having posts written by guest bloggers on your blog allows you to offer new topics to your audience.

It is now proven that most people get tired of the routine quickly, especially in the digital world. Soon the usual readings become boring in the eyes of those who follow you.

Publishing Guest Posts Is a Great Way to Engage Readers.

It allows you to avoid writing the usual promotional article. But above all, you can broaden the audience of people who will know your brand when your guest bloggers share the guest post written by them with their network. Many companies in the world have chosen this route. They buy most of their content from other bloggers in their industry or neighboring sectors.

Tip: Guest bloggers can help you offer new content to your readers when you don’t have much time to write content. Or when you can’t count on a team of copywriters, editors, or content specialists.

Typically, a guest post offers mutual benefits for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. Imagine guest blogging as a win-win situation.

How to Start Guest Blogging

Before you get started with guest posts, make sure you are clear about what you want to get from the guest blogging experience. You need to research blogs from non-competing companies for which you can provide valuable information to readers.

Designing guest posts for your partners is already a great place to start. It may be the first step toward a successful co-marketing strategy. You may also think that you are hosted on your partners’ blog to develop relationships with new companies that already work with them.

How Do You Write a Guest Post?

There are some steps for accomplishing a successful guest post:

1. Start Doing Guest Posting Research

The Internet is a world where spam is around the corner. Make sure you don’t post guest posts on websites or blogs that have a bad reputation for Google. And prevent unqualified bloggers from posting spam content on your blog.

You will need to focus on finding copywriters, ghostwriters, and bloggers who take care of your niche—select websites in your market and companies with a similar background.

You will need to be in line with what guest bloggers write on their posts. And that the content is in line with the interests of your company! If the guest post does not align with your business, brand, or tone of voice, it will have an inverse and negative impact.

2. What You Need to Ask Yourself Before Hosting or Being Hosted With a Guest Post:

• Does this blog or blogger have many active followers around its brand? Are comments, shares, interactions real?
• Can they be counted on, or certified social accounts? Do they regularly post their articles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok profiles?
• Do they have a high and beneficial domain rating for my SEO?
• Is their industry complementary or associable with mine?+

EXTRA TIP: when looking for guest bloggers on Google, write a sector keyword + “guest post,” “write for us” or something similar.

For example, if you want to write about 2021 travel tips, you can google:

• Travel tips 2021 guest post
• or, Travel tips 2021 seeking guest posts
• also, try Travel tips 2021 write for us
• Travel tips 2021 guest post submissions

3. What Should a Successful Guest Post Look Like?

The key to writing a quality guest post is to consider it as an added value for your audience. Never as a form of advertising!

Your guest posts must be designed to educate your reader, not to promote your product or service. If the topic is relevant to your product or service, there is nothing wrong with mentioning it. But there is a big difference between shameless selling and offering useful and usable information to readers.

Aim to write to establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your field. Introduce yourself to a new audience and build authentic relationships with other bloggers or companies.

Write a Clear and Concise Bio of the Author.

Although some companies allow you to include links to your website within your blog’s main body, many prohibit it or modify the links over time. Therefore, your biography is probably the only place in your guest post that will include a permanent link to your website.

Internal Links

Try to include at least one internal link relevant to one of the previous posts you posted on the blog. They will appreciate this little act that helps increase brand authority and traffic.

Social Signals and Sharing

End each post with a call-to-action asking readers to leave a comment or share. The more people comment and share your blog, the more popular your post will become in an SEO search.

Promote your guest post on your social channels. It is a nice gesture that will also generate more traffic to your guest blogger and his business. It should now be automatic to share your content – and it’s a popular way to say “thank you” to your host blogger.

The Position, Where to Insert the Links of the Guest Post?

Deciding where to insert a backlink in a guest post is of fundamental importance.

If the link pointing to your site is not placed in the correct position of the text, it will be worth very little in the eyes of Google and its spiders.

Avoid the classic positions. The most discounted and most used to insert links:

• Footer
• Header
• Sidebar
• Widgets
• The various “powered by”
• Pages dedicated only to links and blogrolls.

Putting the same links scattered on the same web page does not increase the relevance of the content for Google. On the contrary, the search engine tends to diminish the value links that all concentrated on the same page.

Track Your ROI

Use Google Analytics to check the traffic generated by your guest post. It will give you a broader idea of what readers want to know.

It is the starting point if it is the first time you do guest posting. From here, you can see what is working and how to optimize for the next time.

These tips will help you avoid writing or accepting spam content and getting the guest blog’s real benefits.

To increase your positioning on search engines and enhance SEO, you need to strengthen your brand’s credibility. Reaching new audiences is one such activity.

How guest posting affects SEO

Guest blogging isn’t just a way to improve relationships in the blogosphere or brand visibility. It is an excellent tool for building domain authority, scaling SEO placements, and a method of getting inbound links. The guest posting content you create should include careful keyword planning as keywords play a great role in ranking high on SERP. Once you create content for guest blogging, the next step you should take is to keep track of the process. To do that, you can use Dopinger Rank Tracker Tool and never let it slip through your fingers.

Developing a guest posting strategy not only favors the production of SEO-friendly content. It allows you to link other websites that use optimized articles to your website as an authoritative online source.

According to the way the Google algorithms work, if other people connect to your blog for content posted on their websites, they will necessarily have to be relevant and exciting.

When people comment, share, appreciate or link to your blog, this affects Google PageRank (or “link juice”). It means appearing on search results when someone searches for a similar topic on Google.

Like all SEO techniques, guest posting for link building has become an abused practice. In particular, former Google Webspam manager Matt Cutts wrote an excellent blog article that targets blog posting for SEO. Matt considers “wild” guest blogging as the root cause of receiving a penalty from Google.

Google currently penalizes forced or abusive link-building practices because they are often related to SPAM or bad SEO practices. Among these, there is also the proliferation of forced or unnatural links to your site.

But this doesn’t have to be your case!

Guest post and publication frequency

Guest posting is always a good idea to advertise your site or blog, especially if you go to publish on websites belonging to the same business niche.

In this way, it is possible to attract new users from other websites.

However, continuous guest posting is harmful because it would be seen as an unnatural way of doing link building. Publishing low-frequency guest posts, however, would be useless. It would not affect SEO positively or negatively on your site.

Conclusion

Following these tips will help you reap the actual benefits of guest blogging. To increase your SEO rankings, boost your brand’s credibility and, reach new audiences in the sector, follow our recommended steps, and only associate your business blog and posts with well-respected marketers.

And as always, keep creating remarkable and consistent content!