“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” It’s a familiar phrase, but perhaps a more relevant one in the world of SEO would be “You give me a backlink and I’ll link to your site, too”. This phrase would sum up one of the tried-and-tested formulas for strengthening a brand’s SEO and, consequently, online presence.
Contributing posts to other brands’ blogs would be one of the best ways for you to garner more backlinks pointing to your website – but why has guest blogging proved so effective in the past?
Guest blogging: an in-a-nutshell definition
Guest blogging – or guest posting, as it is otherwise known – would involve you creating, or having someone else create on your behalf, content that is then published on a website that isn’t yours.
This content should be crafted carefully to ensure that it fits in naturally and seamlessly with the type of content that is already on the blog or that blog’s audience would expect. In return, all you would ask for is, within the content of the blog post, a hyperlink back to your website – hence the term “backlink”.
You might initially think that spending time, effort or even money on guest posting seems self-defeating as a marketing tactic for your own organisation. However, this strategy can expose your brand to a fresh audience, while the blog owner could delight as you share the content with your own firm’s followers.
You can funnel more traffic back to your site
It’s a pretty simple equation: when you post on someone else’s site and include a backlink to yours, you can expect a few people looking at that site to visit yours. This traffic would be known as referral traffic, which is accounted for by the SEO tracking tool Google Analytics.
On the Google Analytics dashboard, you can assess the quality of the website from which referral traffic is arriving – and, the more of that traffic that does arrive from that site, the better for your own site’s SEO.
You can portray yourself as an expert
If you’ve landed yourself a place on a respected blog in the first place, many readers of that blog will assume that you must be worthy of their attention, too. You shouldn’t stop at just one well-regarded blog, though; you should also look for others to which you could post content credited to you.
When you find a blog that seems just the right fit for that content, look for some kind of “Write for Us” or “Become a Contributor” page on that blog and then follow the relevant instructions you see on that page.
You can build links – but the content must be good
Link building is good for your SEO, but you should remember to not to insert the same hyperlinked text too often, lest Google might get suspicious. If you’re not sure how to write the rest of the content, our own skilled and experienced copywriters could take the job off your hands – but nonetheless write in your name and voice.
