Back in the good old days, you could manipulate the search engines as long as you had some extra money lying around. You could buy links from other websites and your rankings would shoot through the roof. Even if you didn’t have money, you could swap links with other websites to create the same results.
Those days died a long time ago and everything was brought to an abrupt halt when Google started kicking sites out of their search engine for trying to manipulate the rules.
Then guest posts came along
While all that carnage was happening, a few smart webmasters were busy writing guest posts for other blogs. These guest posts would always include a link back to the author’s website and it would help increase their search engine rankings over time.
It didn’t take long for those rule breakers to latch onto guest posting and it started to get abused, just like any other link building method that started out with ethical SEO origins.
If you think you can spam other sites with guest posts today, you might be in for a surprise, but it’s still a great way to build backlinks to your site and your search engine rankings will improve.
Targeting the right websites
Don’t bother wasting your time targeting websites that don’t have any domain authority, as the links will be practically useless (We’ll come back to this later).
You also don’t want to spend too much time trying to write guest posts for websites if they’re not in any way related to your industry, as Google loves relevance, so a backlink from a domain with less authority could still be more helpful than a backlink from a huge site with lots of authority if the latter has nothing to do with your industry.
The right websites you should be posting on are those related to your industry and those with lots of domain authority.
Squeezing more juice out of your guest posts
We’ve covered the basics and you now know what websites you should be targeting when it comes to guest posts, but this isn’t what we’re going to focus on today.
We will now look at a few cool ways you can squeeze more juice out of your guest posts, which is great since they usually take you ages to write in the first place.
Look for potential superstars
Earlier on I told you to forget about targeting blogs if they didn’t have any domain authority. This is simply because the backlinks won’t count for anything and there is a good chance you’ll be wasting your time, since the websites will probably fizzle out and die sooner, rather than later.
As with everything, there is always an exception to the rule. You’ll discover some new websites that don’t have much domain authority, but for some reason you know deep down they will eventually become very powerful sites.
You need to use your intuition when trying to work out if the site will eventually become a winner and you might get it wrong a few times, but sometimes you just know it will succeed.
You should write guest posts for those sites even though they don’t have much domain authority for 2 big reasons:
- It will be easier to get your posts accepted on a newer website
- Your guest post backlinks will be very powerful after a few years
Send them back to the ‘right’ page
When you include a link in your author bio you don’t want to send people to the homepage of your site as it’s practically worthless.
They have just read all the way to the end of your post so they obviously loved it, which is why you should send them to a dedicated landing page set up to collect their email address.
Once they’re on your list they won’t be able to forget about you and you’ll be able to build up a relationship with them going forwards.
The guest posting blitz
When you write a guest post on a popular blog, people will know who you are for about an hour, but they will soon forget about you.
Write guest posts for multiple websites in the same industry and they won’t be able to forget about you. They will no doubt read multiple blogs and when they keep seeing your name popping up over and over again your name and website will stick in their head going forwards, so it’s an easy way to make a name for yourself.
Just decide on the websites you want to target: Then write all your guest posts ahead of time. Reach out to the site owners and ask them if they can publish the post within a specific time frame and you’ll accomplish your goal.
Smart beats spamming every time
The tactics we’ve spoken about today will help you with SEO and your website will achieve much higher rankings over time.
Guest posting will always be a great tactic to use, but you just need to do things the smart way instead of trying to spam your way around the internet until Google takes a disliking to your site!
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