Are you looking to grow your website traffic and let everyone know about your business? When done well guest posting leads to significant increases in organic traffic and domain authority. The first step of guest posting is creating your content and write an article or interview. It should showcase you engage readers and find the right website to guest post on. Take time to identify a website and then contact them to request that they post it.
Why Guest Posting Matters
Google’s most recent search algorithm focuses on page authority, high-quality information on a page, and the higher that page ranks. This can work to your advantage to know what guest posting is worth and will help you build the most powerful kind of link. Google’s current algorithm appears to give more weight to links, as opposed to the sidebars or footer. Guest posting can get you valuable backlinks in the main content of another page with very high authority.
Guest Post on High-Authority Sites that Your Target Audience Visits
Post on a site that consistently runs engaging content instead of keyword-stuffed clickbait. Once readers click over to your site they will find more content they’re already reading a site in your niche. That means “stickier” traffic, and people that could end up becoming long-term readers. It might be tempting to take a scattershot approach to submit pitches to sites in your niche. It will be better for you in the long run to a spike in traffic you’d get from an unrelated site.
Avoid Duplicates (Be Original)
Your guest post should be original content and avoid submitting anything you’ve already posted on your site in the past. The people who run high-quality sites don’t want recycled content; they take pride in providing original posts. Also, the site you’re submitting to should only submit original content for guest posts. Recycling posts on other sites lead to duplicate content, which has the potential to damage your site’s Google ranking. Often, sites will tell you exactly what they’re looking for in a guest post for people to pitch work. Good places to find these:
- Social media
- Google search
Spend Time on Your Guest Posting
Make sure the post you’re submitting represents your best work, free of spellings and grammatical errors. Demonstrate an actual knowledge of the topic, stuffed with keywords and backlinks to your site. Also, people can tell the difference between blog posts that are well-researched. Create something that the owner of the site you’re posting on can feel good about. In addition, to make sure the post is as good as it can be, clarify any sections that might be confusing to readers.
Use Advanced Search to Find High-Quality Sites
There are a few tricks you can use in Google search to narrow down the results such as try using modifiers like “inurl:guest-post.” Moreover, it shows sites that have the words “guest post” in their URLs, which will show you sites looking for contributors. This is a perfectly valid method, to find sites with steep competition for guest posters. Luckily, there’s another method you can use to dig up: a targeted keyword search.
- [keyword] “guest post by”
- [keyword] “guest post written by”
- [keyword] “guest article”
Terms like these will target guest posts that don’t necessarily advertise for guest posts, but still accept them.