What is Guest Blogging, Importance of Guest Blogging

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging also called “guest posting,” is the act of writing content for another company’s website. Generally, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry in order to:

• Attract traffic back to their website
• Boost their domain authority using external links to high-authority domains
• Increase their brand credibility and awareness, and
• Build relationships with peers in their industry.

Almost always, guest blogging offers mutual benefits for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. In other words, guest blogging is a two-way street — so when you decide to hop on the guest blogging bandwagon, you should consider featuring posts by guest bloggers on your own website, too.

How Does Guest Blogging Impact SEO?

As long as you’re careful and considerate about creating high-value guest blogs for legitimate websites, guest blogging can be a great tool for building your domain authority and moving up in SEO rankings.

It’s understandable, though, why many have questioned whether or not guest blogging will hurt their business. With the risk of “spam bloggers” who try to bribe blog owners into letting them post low-quality content for their own link-building and SEO benefit, many marketers have decided to opt against it entirely.

Ultimately, developing an SEO-boosting guest blogging strategy comes down to providing genuine, helpful and relevant content to educate readers — not low-quality content used as a mere container for links to your website.

So as long as your content is of high quality, guest blogging is a great way to increase your site rankings. The way Google sees it, if other people are linking back to your blog on their own websites, then the content on your blog must be relevant and interesting. When individuals comment, share, like or link to your blog, it moves up in Google’s PageRank — that means, it’s much more likely to pop up first when someone googles a similar topic.

But Google PageRank is only an algorithm, so it can’t tell the difference between dynamic content and spam! So while cramming your guest blog posts with links and keywords will push you farther up in the ranking, it probably won’t generate any new, high-fit traffic, and it definitely won’t establish you as an authority in your field.

Why Is Guest Blogging Important For Your Business?

Guest blogging offers a number of benefits for any business. By sharing your expertise on other companies’ websites, you can establish yourself as an authority figure within your market, build relationships with other thought leaders in your field and expose your brand to an entirely new audience.

Additionally, featuring guest posts on your own blog will help you deliver new perspectives and fresh content to your audience. We’re all guilty of falling victim to a routine and growing tired of the same old stuff, so featuring guest posts is a great way to keep readers engaged — not to mention the promotional boost that occurs when your guest bloggers share their blogs with their personal network.

Some blogs, like OpenView, source the majority of their content from other leaders in their industry. Even if you don’t have the resources to stick to a robust blogging cadence, guest bloggers can help you offer new content to your readers without much additional time and effort needed by your team.

Have you ever considered guest blogging before?  

Do it!  Guest blogging offers many benefits and can even help your business be more successful! Read the reasons why guest blogging is important below.

Authority

Demonstrate your authority by showing your expertise in an area. After a site publishes your guest blog post, the site is recognizing you as someone they trust to share information. By writing about the area you specialize in, you build your credibility and readers will see you as the “go to” person for information. Ideally, when readers need the services you provide in the future, they will remember you!

Branding

Build your brand by guest blogging on websites to increase your exposure. Find popular websites or sites that are relevant to your business and request to add a guest article or blog post. After your guest blog post is published, new visitors will be exposed to your business. This gets your name out to a new audience and helps you brand your brand. No matter what site you guest blog for, putting your knowledge in writing serves as advertising for you and your business.

Google Authorship

By guest blogging, you can attain Google Authorship, letting Google know who you are! If you are using Google+, you just add the blog post to the “contributor to” section in your bio. This helps you attain Google Authorship, allowing a picture to appear next to your name in search results for each post your write. Google Authorship improves your rankings in Google search results as well as click-through rates.

Improve Your Writing Skills

Guest blogging is a great way to put your ideas in writing. When a site publishes your blog post, you begin to build a portfolio of articles. You may even gets comments that inspire new ideas for things to write about or services to provide.

New Leads

Visitors that read your blog post can turn into new leads for your business. When you guest blog you are networking with new potential leads. The visitors that are exposed to your guest blog post might be impressed with your knowledge and reach out to you for more information about your services. Even if they don’t reach out to your now, they have made a positive association between you and the services you provide. If you are not looking for leads, guest blogging can also help you build relationships and new contact in the industry you work in.

Website Traffic

An important aspect of guest blogging, is the increase in traffic to your website. When you write a guest blog post, be sure to ask for a link to your website in exchange. This link will send quality traffic to your website after someone reads your blog post. An increase in website traffic means more people are coming to your website to learn about your services.

Whether you are looking to gain recognition for your expertise or build your business, guest blogging is a great means for exposure. Wondering how to guest blog? Email a related site and ask to contribute an article or blog post. In return for writing an article, be sure to request a direct link back to your website. This will allow readers to associate you with what they learn in the post.

What Does High-Quality Guest Blogging Look Like?

The key to writing a high-quality guest blog is to think of it as a value-add for your audience .

As with any type of inbound content, your guest blogs should be intended to educate your reader, not promote your own product or service. If the topic is relevant to your product or service, then of course there’s no harm in featuring it in your blog. But there’s a big difference between selling yourself and offering helpful, actionable information to your readers.

Instead, write guest blogs with the purpose of establishing yourself as an authority figure in your field, introducing your name to a new audience and building genuine relationships with other bloggers or businesses.

Here are a few other quick tips to help you enhance your guest blogging strategy:

1. Write a clear, concise author bio. Although some companies allow you to include links back to your website within the main body of your blog, many prohibit it or change the links over time. Your bio, then, is likely the only place in your guest post that will include a permanent link back to your website.
2. Try to include at least one relevant internal link back to one of the company’s previous blog posts within your guest post. They’ll appreciate the research you’ve done and this small act helps increase their own authority and traffic.
3. Conclude each post with a call-to-action that asks readers to leave comments. Remember, the more people to comment on and share your blog, the more popular your post will become in a SEO search.
4. Promote your guest blog post on your own social media networks. This is a nice gesture that will also generate more traffic back to your guest blogger and their business. By now, it should be second nature for you to share your content — and it’s a good way to say “thank you” for publishing your guest post. The team behind classic gaming site Solitaired takes their guest post promotion to one more level. When they post high quality solitaire or game related content on other sites, they also actively market and drive links to those articles. It’s great for their publishing partner, and it improves the strength of their backlinks.
5. Use Google Analytics to track how much traffic your guest post is generating. This will give you a broader idea of what readers want to hear about and see what is working for your business.

Guest post sites keywords query

There are many search operators for the search engine which we have added the below for your reference. So that you can use that search query related to your business for finding guest post sites.

• travel tips +”write for us”
• law firm + write for us
• legal blog write for us
• law guest post submission
• legal “write for us”
• Pet write for us
• Automotive “write for us”
• blog + write for us
• sports blog write for us
• health + write for us + guest post
• beauty :inurl: write for us
• home improvement guest blog
• E-commerce “write for us”
• small business + write for us
• startup write for us
• business + write for us
• inurl write for us
• parenting “guest post”
• kids “write for us”
• write for us technology guest post
• news”+”write for us”
• IOT “write for us”

Keywords based query for Guest post

• Keyword “submit your content”
• Keyword “submit post”
• Keyword “guest post”
• Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
• Keyword “suggest a post”
• Keyword “submit an article”
• Keyword “contributing writer”

Advanced Search

If the first strategy doesn’t provide you with enough relevant results to accomplish your guest blogging/link building goals, it’s time to take things to the next level and start using some advanced link prospecting strategies.

As in the example above, everything starts with the right keyword, that’s why it’s of utmost importance to first create a list of targeted phrases and topics which you can effectively combine with your search strings. For example: SEO, search engine optimization, link building, link prospecting, etc.

Prospecting is an exhausting process most of the time. It tends to eat up a lot of your free time if you don’t do it with a specific goal in mind. That’s why, apart from having a firm grip on your niche-related topics, you need to start using advanced search operators that will certainly help you narrow your scope and find the best opportunities in record time.

Some of the key operators include:

• Intitle search – This one is pretty self-explanatory. It looks for the desired text within page titles. This operation is terrific for analyzing content and seeing if the topic you’re planning to cover has already been written about on a specific site. Example: intitle:"SEO guest blogging".

• inurl search – This search command looks for keywords and search strings directly within the link. This search modifier is great for quickly searching through sites and finding “guest post”, “guest blogging”, “guest blogging guidelines” or “contributor” pages. It’s great for finding content about a specific topic on various sites.

Though similar, these two search modifiers work well together. This is how I often use and combine them:

• inurl:[guest] + [topic]
• intitle:[topic] + inurl:"write for us"
• intitle:[topic] + inurl:"guest blog"
• [topic] + inurl:"submit" + intitle:blog"

Exact match search – putting quotation marks around your keyword or search topic will tell Google to provide only exact results for your query. This is terrific for stalking your prospects or looking for specific input on even more specific topics from your desired influencers or websites.

The cut search – This search modifier eliminates the unwanted fat from your research. If you, for example, type in "Rad Basta" -Dibz, Google will ignore any Dibz related results. This is especially useful when you’re research is constantly being interrupted by specific sites or pages.

• Site search – Typing "site:name.com" will limit Google’s search to a single website. For example: site:fourdots.com "Rad Basta". This is great for stalking influencers and finding relevant topics you can write about for a specific online publisher.

The OR – This search technique allows you to search for multiple terms at once. For example: "Rad Basta" CEO OR Founder OR President. OR can be replaced with a pipe operator.

Following these tips will help you avoid writing or accepting spammy content and, in turn, reap the true benefits of guest blogging. To increase your SEO rankings, boost the credibility of your brand and reach new audiences in your industry, follow our recommended steps and only associate your business blog and posts with well-respected marketers.