Wednesday 6 February 2013

SEO tips for Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great technique for…
  • Building links
  • Driving targeted traffic
  • Spreading your brand
  • Increasing your social following
  • Building relationships
There’s no reason for concentrating strictly on SEO when guest blogging.  The benefits are diverse and transcend the affects of just the backlinks on your rankings.  However, the fact that you ARE link building shouldn’t be ignored.

Here are 5 seo tips that will help you get better rankings from your guest blogging.

1) Vary Your Anchor Text

It seems like many still hold exact match as the holy grail of anchor text.  The truth is that exact match is and has been losing its effectiveness for a long time.  You can build a much stronger link profile and gain better links from your guest blogging by varying your anchor text.
There isn’t one single formula for varying your anchor text, just get creative!  Use synonyms, extract some terms, include other terms etc.  Your ticket to effective and varied linking text is partial match and synonyms.
Ex. Keyword: WordPress plugins for SEO
  • Partial Match: WordPress plugins
  • Partial Match: plugins for SEO
  • Partial Match: plugins for link building
  • Synonyms: WP plugins for SEO
  • Synonyms: WP plugins for search engine optimization
  • Both: Easy WP SEO
  • Both: SEO Plug-ins for your site
  • Both: Build SEO rankings with plugins
Like I said, there’s no single strategy for your variation.  The 3 fast and dirty methods I go by: Add terms, remove terms, and use synonyms.

2) Optimize Your Title

We’re stepping into dangerous territory with this tip.  Let me remind you that guest blogging has many uses besides SEO and these tips are for improving your SEO without concentrating only on SEO.
Including your keyword in the title tag will be very helpful for the relevance of your post.  The sooner your keyword appears in the title the better.  By using keyword variation, you give yourself a lot more options for creating a title that is both appealing for users and also optimized for your SEO.

3) Find Relevant Domains

The URL is a very important factor on the relevance and power of a webpage.  One reason for including your keyword in the title is that it will then show up in the URL on most blogs.  You can take this practice one step further by purposely writing for blogs that have part of the keyword phrase you’re targeting in their domain name.

I like to use My Blog Guest to search for blogs in my niche.  You can visit MBG to find a list of websites in your niche that are actively accepting guest posts.



Once you do this you should have a list of sites in your industry.  You can mouse over each site title to preview the link URL.  This way you can see very quickly if part of your keyword is in the domain.
Of course, there are many other important factors so don’t get too concerned with this tactic alone.  Check out the recent posts for comments and social activity to get a better feel for the popularity and liveliness of the site.  A great result would have at least one word from your keyword phrase in the domain and an active audience.

4)  Don’t Use Your Resource/Profile for SEO

Leaving the SEO benefits of your post to the resource/profile links alone is a mistake.  You can use those links to drive traffic to your site by promoting an offer or some other related and appealing page on your website.
One of the strongest types of links you can get is an editorial link.  An editorial backlink is a link from within the actual body content of a page where only the webmaster can edit the content.  It’s a powerful link because only the webmaster has control over this part of the page, and usually webmasters don’t just link to anyone.  It’s a sign of trust.

5) Link Early

The sooner your link the better.
Google values links that appear earlier in the content more than those that come later on.  It makes sense doesn’t it?  If you have an important resource to recommend or if you are writing a response to a similar article, you would link to it right away.  The first links in an article often lead to the pages most relevant to it.
You can use this knowledge to your advantage by linking to the page on your site you’re trying to rank higher within the first 1-3 paragraphs of your post.


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