Here, we take a look at how publishing high-quality guest posts on websites within a similar niche provides a great opportunity for obtaining new traffic and followers.
Guest blogging has been around since long before the main social networking platforms arrived. The original idea of guest blogging was that two websites within a similar niche would exchange content in order to mutually increase each other’s audience.
Once guest blogging became a well-known way to get backlinks to improve the search presence of a website, the situation changed somewhat. Unfortunately over time some ‘spammy’ practices appeared whereby webmasters would submit articles to blog directories or irrelevant low quality networks with the sole intention of getting a backlink to their own site.
Advice from Google
In January 2014, Matt Cutts, the former Head of Web Spam at Google, discussed the decline of guest blogging as a method of gaining links. Cutts famously declared ‘Stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.’
Fast forward to almost two years later and many SEO companies and individual webmasters are still finding guest blogging to be a great source of traffic for their sites. So did Cutts get it wrong?
Focus On Providing Value
Well not entirely. Those webmasters who still indulge in ‘spammy’ practices are not faring well. It is not a good idea to offer guest articles with unoriginal content to any old website in an unrelated niche.
However, if a guest article focuses on providing significant value to the website that is publishing it, as well as the audience that is reading it, then guest posting is still one of the best ways to get new links and traffic to your own site.
Establish Your Name and Your Brand
A successful guest post will concentrate on providing excellent content which establishes you as a leading authority in your field. When you write a guest post you are reaching an audience that you wouldn’t normally have access to, so it’s imperative that the content is compelling and engaging, particularly if you’re trying to build brand awareness.
Make sure that your writing is completely unique. The content could provide a solution to a problem within your niche, or it could be a thought-provoking response to some industry news.
Guest Posts Open Up New Sources of Traffic
When superb guest posts including a link back to your site are published on a website within a similar niche to your own, this will open up various different channels of web traffic. You will benefit by receiving traffic from the publishing site itself. However, as many websites also choose to share their blogs and articles on social media platforms, you will also get the opportunity to obtain many more social media followers. When you’re choosing a site to publish on, it’s often a good idea to find a site which possesses a large number of social media fans so that you can ‘borrow’ some of them.
Backlinks Still Matter
Google still uses backlinks and something called ‘link juice’ as factors in their secret algorithm. This helps them determine where to position a site in the rankings for any given key phrase. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get a backlink to count. However, if the process is carried out correctly, then backlinks still carry some weight and can improve the SEO for your site. A guest article with a link from a high-authority site pointing to your own internal page should include various on-page SEO elements in the text, which must read naturally and not detract from the flow of the writing.
FSE Digital are experts in creating informative and engaging guest post content which perfectly matches the expectations of a client’s customers in terms of topic and tone. If you would like assistance in reaching a wider audience for your business website, get in touch with us today.
