How to Use Guest Posting to Boost SEO Performance
In order to boost your SEO, you should contribute to high-authority sites in order to extend the reach of your content.
Guest posting on other websites is
helpful for reaching new audiences and interacting with them - but your content
can't appear on every site you find just so you can land on Page 1 - you have
to focus on the sites that matter to your audience. Your SEO strategy is just
as crucial as your approach to content marketing, so you've got to do your
research in order to get the most out of both.
Domain Authority and Relevance Research
As a marketing expert, pitching editors at publications about, say,
cooking won't be very helpful. The chances of contributing content that far
off-topic are pretty slim, and even if you managed to post there, all the
irrelevant links wouldn't help your SEO in the long run.
(I know it sounds simple, but I'd wager that if you ask just about any publication
editor, she would be able to tell you a story about the last time someone tried
to submit a totally random article that had no place on her site.)
Identify the guidelines for guest posting backlinks
Links metrics from MozBar, for example, can tell you pretty quickly
whether links in an article are internal or
external and whether they follow or nofollow.
It is strongly encouraged to use follow links to pass link juice through sites into new sites to boost SEO, but you
will not be doomed to failure if the site doesn't allow them; you can gain
useful traffic to generate leads via organic referrals.
Also, make sure contextual links are allowed in the body of your guest post. You can improve your search engine
optimization by placing contextual links in the right publications (tools like
cognitiveSEO can help). They carry more link juice than bios or footer links,
for instance, so they play an important role. Additionally, they can increase
CTR and create a better user experience by providing additional information to readers.
You're going to have a bad time if you're only writing and linking to
benefit your SEO instead of providing value to your actual audience. Writing
for humans and optimizing for search is key - which brings me to my next point.