Sep 27 2011

5 Ways Guest Blog Posts Can Help Your SEO

If you find yourself struggling to produce enough content to keep your blog relevant and fresh, consider opening your blog up to guest authors and guest blog posts. Not only will guest authors help keep your blog alive, it also provides long-term SEO benefits.

Here are 5 ways guest blog posts can help your SEO:

More content for the search spiders

SEO thrives on content. The more content the search spiders can read and index, the better chance your site has of matching a particular search query. If you are having a difficult time following a set schedule for posting new content to your blog, guest authors and guest posts can help fill in the gaps. You can schedule guest posts whenever you need content to go live, giving the search spiders a reason to come back and re-index your site.

More content for your readers

Guest posts can help keep your blog from becoming stale, giving your readers a reason to check back everyday. If you don’t maintain a consistent posting schedule, you might end up training your readers to NOT visit your blog because they have learned that there won’t be anything new to read.

Guest posts also introduce new voices and opinions to your readers. This keeps them on their toes because they are never sure what kind of information they will get from day to day. Every author is going to take their own spin on the same topic, meaning your readers will never get bored.

More content for your social media marketing campaign

Just like SEO, social media devours content. If you want to keep your social media marketing campaign alive and relevant, you have to consistently be promoting new content. Twitter, for instance, is an instantaneous stream of information, meaning that new content is constantly replacing the old. A lone Tweet isn’t going to get noticed among the hundreds that clutter someone’s feed. Consistency is key! The more blogs posts you have going live, the more reasons you have to post something to your social networks.

Guest authors want to promote their content as well, so you can almost always count on them to promote their blog posts within their own social communities. It may be their blog post, but it’s your blog they are promoting! Your blog is now being exposed to a much larger social network. Each Tweet, Like, share, upload and post is a social signal that the search engines use in their ranking algorithms. The more social signals your blog has the better!

Target different keywords

You can’t control what a guest author says, but you can ask for posts that center around a certain topic. Ultimately, you are responsible for the content that goes live on your business blog and you want to make sure it is something that will resonate with your target audience. Establishing guest author guidelines (like preferred topics) means you can target different keywords or more long-tail keywords as you see fit. As the blog owner, you have the right to go in an edit guest blog posts and include anchor text to various related blog posts or pages of your own site. (Just make sure you make your guest authors aware!)

Attract new visitors

Hopefully you aren’t allowing just any guest author to write for your blog, but instead focusing on other industry experts who can add value to your blog. Each guest author probably writes their own business/industry blog and has their loyal readers. When they promote their guest post to their readers, they are essentially driving traffic over to your blog. Some of these new readers may delve a little deeper into your blog and like what they see. Even if only a small fraction of them come back a second time, you’ve successfully increased your reach (read more on how to increase blog traffic here)!

Generate more inbound links

A guest author is going to promote their guest post because it helps build their reputation and builds their own link portfolio. Every time they promote their blog post, your blog gets an inbound link! You can’t say for sure how many new inbound link sources a guest blog post will generate, but it’s a fair bet that you’re link portfolio is going to reap the benefits from it.

There are a few things to remember when opening up your blog to guest posts. At the end of the day you are responsible for the content being published on your blog. Even though you aren’t writing the content yourself, make sure you taking the time to edit each guest blog post before it goes live! Don’t let a rouge guest post ruin your blog’s reputation. Your SEO success and online reputation go hand-in-hand.

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a full-service Boston SEO firm and social media marketing company. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his B2B SEO knowledge by posting daily search engine optimization articles to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal, and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers.

8 Responses to “5 Ways Guest Blog Posts Can Help Your SEO”

  1. Rank Pursuit says:
    September 27, 2011 at 5:17 pm

    It also give you an opportunity to network with others in your industry. Building professional relationships can go much further than simply getting more content and building a few links.

  2. Daniel says:
    September 27, 2011 at 8:20 pm

    I like that, I have always wondered about opening a section to my guests to post. I might try this with one of my blogs. Once again, another great post!

  3. carolin says:
    September 29, 2011 at 12:32 pm

    hi,

    Yes, guest post is really a best method to get more and more traffic on the site. I have found one site : http://www.techmagnets.com/ for guest blogging.

    Thanks
    Carolin

  4. cctv says:
    September 30, 2011 at 5:00 am

    Yes, Guest Posts are really great for SEO. I found that my website is getting lots of traffic from guest posts.

  5. Henry Louis says:
    October 3, 2011 at 7:58 am

    I would like to contradict here. Guest posts in the current era do not yield those benefits which it used to around 3 to 4 years back.

  6. FD Thomson says:
    October 4, 2011 at 10:13 am

    It is an interesting way of explanation about the advantages of guest blog post. Thanks for sharing this information.

  7. eagle hills real estate says:
    October 13, 2011 at 10:02 am

    Guest posts are very helpful as they maintain your blogs status even when you are too busy to write or you do not have a topic to write on at that particular time. This can also increase traffic to your site as the guest post gives fresh content which the readers are not used to. Informative post.

  8. Michael Anderson says:
    November 4, 2011 at 5:32 pm

    Very challenging thanks, It is my opinion your current audience will probably want far more stories like this continue the good content.