Solve Your SEO Problems With Guest Blogging

Julia Borgini

Guest blogging’s been pronounced dead quite a few times over the last couple of years. Yet if you take a quick spin around the interwebs you’ll see that many people are growing their businesses through guest blogging. So how can it be dead?

Well, it’s not. Guest blogging is alive and well and a great way to solve any SEO problems you may have with your website. That’s because it’s able to help you out with three of the best ways to get organic traffic to your site:

• High-quality content, regardless of where it is online, is always good. Search engines love it, and if it’s placed on a high-quality site, they’re fine with guest blogs.
  
• Earning backlinks from authoritative sites is a great way to raise your site’s (and domain’s) search ranking.
  
• Social sharing of your guest posts is another marker of high-quality content for search engines, mainly because if people are sharing it, they figure it must be good.

Let’s take a closer look at this.

High-quality content always finds a home

Many websites use guest bloggers on a regular basis, including Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, HubSpot, Forbes, and Fast Company. Their staff writers already produce great articles for them, but they understand that there are other writers out there with different perspectives and want to showcase those voices on their blogs too.

To maintain those high-standards, they have rules and guidelines that all guest bloggers must follow. Rules that cover how they accept pitches, the topics they want to cover on the blog, and guidelines about style, tone, links, and more. All of their writers, staff or guest, must follow these guidelines in order to have their work published on the site. Period.

Earn search engine love with inbound links from your guest blog posts

It starts with having all the usual parts of SEO covered on your website: good keywords on all pages, filling out all the meta data for your site, search-friendly headlines, alt tags on images, etc. But what gets you even more search engine love is inbound links to your site and web pages from authoritative sites. Just check out this graph from Moz about search engine ranking factors:

Guest blogging on authoritative sites increases the number of those inbound links, and therefore your search engine ranking as well. How you do this is by writing an engaging byline/bio that points back to your website. Here’s mine on KISSMetrics:

Bonus tip: Set up some tracking links in your bio, so you can find out which bio is working best, and which site is giving you more traffic.

Social sharing is another reason to guest blog

Usually when I get accepted to write a guest blog for a site, they ask me to share the content on my social media networks. It’s part of the “agreement” between us, and to be honest, something I’d do anyways. Add this to their sharing on social media, and your guest blog post is getting shared to a wider audience. Again, this is just one of the reasons guest blogging is good: to get exposed to a new audience.

One of my posts on Social Media Examiner has been shared over 5,500 times on social media, with over 3,000 shares on Twitter alone.

Search engines like the social sharing because it signals to them that your content is good. They take the amount of social sharing into account when they return search results. They take all of these factors into consideration (high-quality content, authoritative sites, social sharing) when they return search results.

Guest blogging CAN solve your SEO problems

It earns you inbound links from authoritative websites. It increases your brand awareness by introducing you to a new audience. And increases your ranking with search engines as it gets shared across social media networks. Guest blogging really can solve a lot of your SEO problems.

Need help getting started with a guest blogging outreach program? Download a copy of my Guest Blogger Outreach Playbook and get started today.

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