Guest Blogging – Baking The Perfect Cake (Without Cooking Your Own Goose)

by | Jul 10, 2013 | Articles, Content Marketing, SEO

Symbol: guy with ipadJuly 10, 2013: Guest posting is a great way to generate inbound links and the consequent higher Page Rank that follows in Google and Bing. But Guest Blogging is risky, because doing it the wrong way can get you consumed — in grisly fashion — by Penguin and Panda, Google’s anti-spam algorithms.Here’s what I think you should do if you’re going to Guest Blog:

  • Make the content great. Genuinely useful content, aimed at your stakeholder audience, is the golden rule of all inbound marketing. Invest in great writers, stake a claim on a valid opinion and serve it up with the meat of great data and actionable points.
  • Choose your friends carefully. Careful evaluation should be given towards where your guest posts are blogged. Generally, Guest Blogging is a quid pro quo transaction, where you provide your partner with free content in exchange for a link and exposure. No money changes hands. Guest blogs should be well developed communities that cover your target audience and helps you spread your brand. Such places should have active commenters, lively discussion, and have a majority of content developed in house.  Places with excellent reputations should be the home for your guest blogs. A blog can also be judged by examining social media followers, engagement numbers and so on.
  • Do it by the numbers. The hosts for your guest blogs should also have robust social media indicators (followers/likes/engagement/etc).  A strong presence on Facebook (due to their Bing Partnership) and Google Plus is advantageous depending on what search engine you wish to rank on – obviously, it’s great to rank well on Google and Plus is still “frontier” territory for many.
  • Not Too Much. Google will be suspicious if a mass of inbound links derives from one site with an unknown reputation. As a general rule, guest blogging should be used to gather a small amount of high quality inbound links. If there are too many, it will resemble link buying, which Google will come down on.
  • Keep it holistic. Guest Blogging should be part of an overall holistic SEO strategy that focuses on the delivery of value to your target audience.  Guest blogging should be used with the cake of engaging content and the sprinkles of robust social media presence, great site usability (both yourself and your blog partner), and interaction between your blog partner and the target audience.
  • Finally, comments. If you plan on ranking on Google (which this author presumes that most of you will be), we recommend that the your blog partner enables G+ comments. Blogger.com platforms do this by default. Using G+ for comments makes it easier for Google to index the content directly, and lets your blog readers give +1’s for a sweet SEO lift.

Guest Blogging can be a terrific tool. The correct use of it can be a valuable “frosting” to one’s existing SEO cake, without making you Panda food.

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