
Strong SEO requires strong content, and one of the best ways to boost your SEO is to extend your content's reach by contributing to high-authority sites.
Guest posting in outside online publications allows you to expand your horizons, reach new audiences, and engage with them on platforms they trust โ but you can't push your content out to every site you can find and expect to land on Page 1. Your SEO strategy is as important as your approach to content marketing, and to maximize the ROI you get from both, you've got to do a little research.
If you're an expert in the marketing industry, it won't be very helpful to pitch editors at publications about, say, cooking. Not only would it be pretty much impossible to contribute content that far off-topic, but even if you did manage to publish there, those links from irrelevant sites wouldn't help you achieve long-term SEO benefits.
(I know that sounds simple, but I bet you could ask just about any publication editor and she'd have a story for you about the most recent time someone tried shopping around a totally random article that had no place on her site.)
For more insights into what publication editors are (and definitely are not) looking for,.
The publications you target should be reputable authorities within your industry, not spammy content farms. A good rule of thumb about whether a site is authoritative enough is to ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable sharing an article from this publication with your friends and professional connections on social media. If not, keep looking.
Tools like MozBar can give you access to link metrics that will show you pretty quickly which links in an article are follow or nofollow and internal or external.
While follow links that carry link juice through sites into new sites are strongly encouraged to build SEO, you won't be doomed to complete failure if a site doesn't allow them; you can still gain valuable organic referral traffic to generate leads.
Be sure to check that contextual links in the body of your guest post are allowed, too. (Tools like cognitiveSEO can help.) Contextual links in the right publications carry more of that link juice than links in bios or footer links, for example, so they play a big role in your SEO efforts. They help Google establish a relevancy factor, and they can also boost CTR and create a better user experience by providing readers with additional valuable information.
It should go without saying, but I'll repeat it once more for the people in the back: If you're writing and linking purely for SEO benefits and not to provide value to your actual audience, you're going to have a bad time. The key is to write for humans and optimize for search โ which leads me to my next point.
Once you've done your publication research, it's time to create and optimize your content for contribution. Guest posting is very different from writing content for your own blog, but there are still SEO factors in any piece of content that you can't afford to ignore:
If it seems like a lot of work to craft optimized guest content, that's because it is. But it's also very much worth the effort because the SEO benefits of guest posting can affect your entire strategy.
The first major benefit is natural backlinks to your site from reputable, high-authority publications. Google is always updating its algorithm and often punishes marketers who use shady tricks for short-term benefits. Done correctly, guest blogging is a long-term strategy that will continue to boost your search visibility over time.
Google takes backlinking into consideration for rankings, and even one contextual link from a highly regarded publication can be worth more than 10 links from lower-quality sites. Remember that the link itself and the anchor text should support the context of that guest post and a healthy link portfolio should contain a variety of types of anchor text.
High-authority publications have a lot of power in the SEO world (and the world of content), and guest contributing can provide valuable brand exposure. By getting your expert insights into leading online publications your audience already trusts and engages with, you're positioning your brand right alongside them.
To learn more about earning valuable brand exposure,
It's important to remember, though, that guest posts aren't link-building farms. Although it might be tempting, overoptimizing your content will only cause Google to punish you by devaluing the SEO juice coming from that backlink. It's far more effective to create informative, optimized content for the right publications because it establishes you as a thought leader and provides valuable opportunities to connect and engage with your audience.
If your content is regularly seen in highly regarded publications, you'll be seen as an expert in your industry โ but the benefits extend past your thought leader's brand and affect the authority of your company, too. Educational assets that you link to in your guest posts can give you high-quality links from reputable sites, which increases your site's domain authority.
That last part โ "reputable sites" โ is the key. Contributing posts to spammy websites just for the links will only come back to bite you in the long run, so it's best to put in the work of targeting publications with active, engaged audiences who are interested in what you have to say.
Need help finding the right sites in your industry?You can even use tools such as Moz or cognitiveSEO to determine whether a link is considered a "good influence" or "no influence" to your overall domain authority, which will keep you from wasting your time..
Guest-contributed content is similar to other forms of content in some ways, but in regards to SEO, it can be an entirely different beast. However, if done correctly, it's one of the most effective strategies for boosting your SEO, getting your content in front of the right audiences, and, therefore, seeing content marketing ROI.
John Hall is the author of the bestselling book "Top of Mind,โ published by McGraw-Hill. He has been called a top sales speaker and a top virtual keynote speaker. John is also an advisor to the growth companies Relevance and Calendar.