Guest Blogging

One of the best ways to create quality back links from relevant websites is through guest blogging. Other bloggers in your field of expertise are usually happy for collaboration from within the community. There are just a few things you should know before submitting a post for guest blog consideration. Don’t try and submit something unless it is your original work. Bloggers want real content written by you, not spun content that is scraped from around the web. Bad post quality will always get your guest blog requests rejected. Here are a few basic tips you should follow for writing all blog content in general.

• Write at least 600 – 800 words minimum. Articles need to be of substantial size if they are to have any link weight.
• Add at least 2 pictures to the post. People love media, Google loves media, bloggers love media, always put pictures and even video in your posts.
• Graphs demonstrating the subject matter you are explaining are a great tool, and other webmasters enjoy when guest bloggers take the time to create something unique.

Just following those three simple rules should improve anyone’s chances of being excepted for guest blogging.

Now the question is how do you find guest blogs?

There are several different ways to find guest blogs related to the subject matter of yours. Searching through competitors blog rolls is a great way to find related pages that allow guest posting. But this can be rather tedious. I prefer searching through Google results works pretty well. Simply typing “guest author” or “guest blog” brings up hundreds of suitable results.

Owning one blog is usually enough of a hassle for most people, so why should I waste my time guest blogging too?

Build a web of authority links within your niche

Each website that allows guest blogging has their own set of rules, however most allow DoFollow links in each post that is written. Some sites allow links in the actually body of the article, and others just allow links in the author box. Both of these can be extremely beneficial for website rankings, especially if the guest blog is considered an authority in your niche. There would be no point to guest blogging if there was no reward. The reward for your efforts is quality anchor texted do follow back links.
These links are useless if you don’t implement them correctly:

• All links directed from your guest blog should have anchor text. This will correlate your website with the anchor words.
• html, <a href=”yoursite.com”>Your Keywords Here</a>
• ubb, [url="yoursite.com"]Your Keywords Here[/url]

These are the two most common options you will experience for anchor text links. Many sites have link button, but for those that don’t it is always worth a go at directly placing the link into the body. If it is known for a fact that the webmaster allows contextual links in the body you should always take advantage of them. Any related links from quality sites in your niche are always beneficial regardless of whether they are from a competitor or not.
The more reputable blogs you are able to post on, the better your online reputation will become. Looking for guest blogs will no longer be something you are required to do as people will seek you out to add content to your sites. This is a very common practice and if you think your blog has high quality content, you may even consider asking people to write guest articles on your site. Someone writing quality posts will only help your page in the rankings. As long as you keep their outbound links at a reasonable level.

There is a fine line between getting quality contextual back links, and writing great content that might rank better than a related article on your personal site.

One thing that is important to remember, is never put more useful content on another person’s site than what is available on yours. In this case you will be contributing to their page ranking above yours in the search engines. Try and stay away from subjects that you have covered on your own site. Unique and quality are the two gems Google is constantly looking for. If your site has quality and unique content that no one else in your niche can provide, then you will dominate the search results. Constantly posting on another person’s blog can help promote this ranking behavior for their website. Community discussion is always great, and guest blogging promotes this behavior, just always keep in mind the fact that you are donating quality articles to someone else.